Well, I’m one entry away from completing my 10 Worst Movies Ever list. Looking back, I realize that my list isn’t nearly comprehensive enough, nor does it include any heavyweights older than a few years. Here are a few rules that govern the dread roster:
- I have to have seen the movie. This automatically excludes Halle Berry’s Catwoman or Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct II.
- Generally, the movie didn’t need or want to be made. Why? Because I said so.
- Even if the movie needed or wanted to be made, it had less than art or entertainment on its mind. Basically, people just got paid to make it, based on a misguided perception (snicker) of market demand.
- The list is a mismatch of movies with pretentions of greatness and movies that came out of development smelling like shit.
- I’ve reserved another more hateful list for entries like the contemptible Brokeback Mountain.
Today’s addition to the list was a shoo-in: I knew it was a stinker when I put it in my Netflix queue.
- Dreamcatcher
- Van Helsing
- Monster’s Ball
- Bad Santa
- Universal Soldier: The Return
- Troy
- Alexander: The Director’s Cut
- The Mangler Reborn
- A Sound of Thunder
A Sound of Thunder is a Hollywood abortion based on Ray Bradbury’s groundbreaking time-travel short story. Bradbury’s story was published when he was 32, way back in 1952, as part of his R is for Rocket collection. In the fifties, the idea of a butterfly’s influence on weather thousands of miles away was novel and awe-inspiring. Bradbury upped the ante by changing thousands of miles to millions of years.
What fascinates me about director Peter Hyams and his stable of untalented writers is that they seem stuck in amber, unaware that the butterfly effect is now a cliche, understood even by grade school kids.
Hyams is an avowed sci-fi/thriller fan and has a long history of undistinguished movies in these genres. Many of these movies I enjoyed. None of them stand up well over time. Outland, The Relic, The Presidio, Timecop, 2010, The Star Chamber, and Capricorn One, the last of which, made in 1978, was probably his most daring attempt to thrill.
In short, he’s not a very good director. He knows how to construct a flick, and how to push basic sci-fi/thriller buttons, but he has no finesse. He’s a factory of sci-fi conceits, where production trumps innovation or vision. It’s almost as if his fan drive prevents him from realizing that more talented directors would never touch this stuff.
It’s pretty clear when you’re watching A Sound of Thunder that no one involved planned to make a breakout sci-fi movie. That’s fine. Unambitious B-movies have a long, happy tradition in Hollywood. And I will give Thunder this: it stinks so bad it achieves camp greatness. Almost.
We can thank Ben Kingsley — who could squat and poop on camera while we watched, enthralled with each constriction of his sphinctre — for elevating the quality of acting, which is uniformly unimpressive.
The movie stars that boring white guy whose sole claim to fame is that he’s a handsome white guy. I just watched the movie last night and I can’t for the life of me remember his name (just looked at the Netflix DVD sleeve: Ed Burns). I am fascinated and appalled that the asshats at the MPAA gave this film a PG-13 that included “partial nudity.” Who doesn’t thrill at a little partial nudity? But when it’s Ed Burns, who obviously worked out for the honor of “spicing up” the rating, walking uncomfortably around his apartment in a pair of boxer shorts, I have to ask: Didn’t partial nudity once mean cock, tits, and ass? Is skin nudity? Is Ed Burns’ skin nudity? Gag me with a spoon.
Rottentomatoes.com yields Thunder‘s humiliating fate in theaters: 8% (that’s just nasty rotten), with 7 positive and 77 negative reviews. I’m not saying the 7 people who found something redeeming in Thunder are idiots, but — ok, I’m saying they are idiots. Particularly Mick LaSalle, who aids and abets the notion that the San Francisco Chronicle is one of the least important newspapers in the world. Here’s his $10 quote:
“If movies have personalities, this one has an appealing one, combining scientific inquisitiveness with giddy pleasure in creating tension for viewers.“
This is a perfectly rational observation — if you haven’t seen the movie. It’s also a vapid (we loooove popcorn movies!) apology for a calculated exercise in shit-making.
I suggest you rent Thunder, if only as an experiment in anthropology. Several men and women come together and convince themselves that a 54-year old time-travel story that already has been eclipsed by more clever conceits is worth foisting off on the public. Woohoo, I just paid for my new houseboat! Bring on the dancing girls!
For fun, let’s explore the dumbness in all its glory:
- In the year 2055, the internet is a century old.
- The death of a butterfly in the Jurassic creates a time wave that plops, at the top of the food chain, a baboon velociraptor. They have bullet-proof hides, which makes sense in a world without bullets, but tender gullets because no one in tens of millions of years ever grabbed a baboon velociraptor by the throat.
- One company controls time travel. One bureaucrat from the government is there to make sure everything is compliant.
- The owner of the time-travel company is gayly insane.
- Dumb low-wage workers drop liquid hydrogen tanks that cause rifle firing mechanisms to misfire in the past. Mayhem ensues.
- Special effects in the Jurassic are no better or worse than those in 2055. Both stink.
- If two cardboard actors walk in front of a green screen long enough, will their performances improve?
- If you cram enough fake-looking CGI cars into a scene, the audience won’t notice that it isn’t having a good time.
- Sixty-five action sequences and 4,325 bad other scenes. Plan 9 From Outer Space had a better ratio.
- Apparently, time waves look like tsunamis. Get it? Time wave? Woooosh!
- Guns never run out of bullets. Never.
- Extraordinarily sophisticated AIs that take impossible amounts of energy to run can be rebooted in a world where no energy exists.
- Why do time waves install evolutionary deviants in the present (2055), but fail to wipe out the artifacts of the current status quo; i.e., the Sears Tower — or 42,000,000 other buildings in Chicago? I buy the idea of co-existing timelines while realities collide, but vines growing on the Hancock Center do not a convincing co-existence make. A gross paucity of imagination.
- Sure, the Indiana Jones archetype is studly, but how many temponaut physicists with advanced computer skills (as portrayed by Ed Burns) are physically strong, can hold their breath underwater in a crisis, wield guns like Rambo, and drive like NASCAR fags. Better-things-to-do-with-my-imagination: 1, Suspension-of-disbelief: 0.
- In the year 2055, the lone black character amongst many white characters is still the first character to die. In Hollywood, the Black Man is lower on the kill org chart than the Dumb Loudmouth Bitch with Fat Hips.
- Oh, and while we’re on the subject of the Quickly Killed Black Man — do black men sing like they’ve got the Spirit just seconds before being mauled by 20 baboon velociraptors? The only thing that would have improved that scene is Nathan Lane in blackface.
- Repeat after me: time is a unit of measurement, not a place.
In Roger Corman’s hands, this would have been a midnight cult flick. In Hyams’ hands, it’s cotton candy.