I went into this movie having read rumors that the test audience rated gave this movie the worst rating in Paramount’s history resulting in the director, Stephen Sommers, being fired; then not actually not being fired. As I mentioned in my introduction, when I watch a movie I do my best to forget about anything I had heard about it so that I can decide for myself how I feel about the movie. When the movie was all said and done, I was surprised with what I had just seen.
The movie was actually good in my opinion. Now before you go off saying how I don’t know what I’m talking about or have horrible taste in movies let me clarify a bit. The movie was good for type of movie it is. It’s a PG-13 movie based on a child’s toy and cartoon. There was non stop action through out the entire movie, similar to “Shoot ‘Em Up”, “Taken”, “Crank” and “Death Sentence”. Granted due to its rating there wasn’t really any gore, but that didn’t stop the fight scenes from being entertaining without the sillyness that movies due to their rating tone down. All in all there wasn’t really one slow point that I can remember.
Now when I bring in the outside knowledge of the lowest test audience rating in Paramount’s history I can definitely see how the movie was re-edited after that viewing. I wasn’t part of the test audience, talked to anyone that was at that showing or seen any parts of it, butthere are certain parts that in my opinon were cut short or moved from one part of the movie to another. For example, in this movie as in most of the movies he’s in, Marlon Wayans, has a comical role. There are three or four times in the movie when he starts joking around that seem to end prematurely. Meaning he’ll say maybe one joke, then it cuts to a new scene although it definitely felt like there was more jokes to come. I feel that after the test audience rating was given, the movie was edited to be more pure action oriented than some action followed by jokes and some slower scenes.
As I stated before I liked the movie as an action filled entertaining movie that required little thinking, so if they did re edit the movie they did a good job overall. There were some scenes, however, that were unintentionally funny or filmed in such a way that you weren’t sure at first what was going on (it wasn’t intentionally filmed this way). If there is going to be a sequel as the movie title and box office earnings suggest, this was a good first movie.
Rating: Brain dead action flick
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