Go check out my review of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice exclusively for Suvudu!

I want a sweet duster like that.

I finally managed to grab my Bluray copy of Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. I saw the movie in theatres originally and I was itching to see it again.

To give a short summary; kids go to see freak show, vampire has cool pet spider, kid screws with vampire’s pet spider, spider bites kid’s friend, kid goes to ask vampire to help friend, vampire bites kid, vampire saves friend, friend wants to be bitten by vampire, Salma Hayek with a beard. Everyone got that? (In all seriousness, the story is fairly solid and I’m just too lazy to type it all up. You can read an actual synopsis here.)

While I very much enjoyed this movie, it got slammed by critics. This is one of those rare times where I can kind of understand why they had problems with it. It’s a movie that can’t seem to decide if it’s for kids or for teenagers, so ends up being for neither. There is language and violence that make this difficult to show a kid, but there are elements that teenagers are going to find too juvenile.

The fact that the movie didn’t do well is really a shame. It’s a fun movie with an interesting array of characters. John C. Reilly wasn’t an actor that came to mind when I thought “vampire”, but that’s kind of what’s nice about it. Oddly enough, the real show stealer is Evra the Snake Boy, played by Patrick Fugit. He managed to infuse a fair amount of comedy into his character and make him seem less like someone who is half serpent and more like a teenager with some unfortunate form of green acne.

The overall character designs for the film are fun and interesting. (Even though it certainly had one of the ugliest, if not THE ugliest, wolf men I’ve ever seen.) Even though many of the freaks at the cirque are bit characters, each actor seemed to work really hard to infuse them with some sort of distinct personality. With such a large cast it’s nice to see a group effort rather than characters that are really nothing more than set dressings.

The effects in the film aren’t great, but they’re passable. It was nice to see that they attempted practical effects when possible instead of going a pure CGI route. The actual style of the film is very sharp and appealing.

At its core, the film has a lot of heart and likable characters. It probably needed some more sorting to help it better find its audience, but ends up being highly entertaining regardless. I’d actually love to see a sequel, but with the abysmal reviews, I’m fairly sure one won’t be made. Luckily it is based off of a book series, so there’s still a way to find out what happens next.

If you’re inclined to give it a chance, I would encourage it. It has more elements to enjoy than to criticize.

Final Score: 4 out of 5.

Unsettling Bruce Willis bot.

Thanks to Netflix and my laziness, I had time to sit down and watch Surrogates starring Bruce Willis. Surrogates is about a future world where most people stay inside, opting to live their lives through a robotic avatar (not the blue kitty kind mind you) that goes out into the world while the user pilots them remotely. Naturally, the surrogate bots tend to be everything their operator is not, and since they are robots, if they are destroyed, their owner remains safely at home…or do they?

To add some spice, someone starts killing surrogates with a device that also kills their operators. It’s the job of Willis’ character to find out the “who”, “what” and “why”. Of course, creepy youthful Willis-bot ends up biting it which forces real life, not so pretty Willis to venture out into the world as a vulnerable meatbag.

While the story was nothing all that unexpected (human protesters against surrogates, surrogate operators who want things to stay the way they are), it was fairly well executed. The twist as to who the real killer was caught me a little off guard, and I was enjoying the movie…then they blew it with the ending.

There’s not much more upsetting in a movie to me than when everything falls apart at the end. The finish for the movie felt forced and disingenuous. It was as if some studio exec said they needed to scrap whatever ending was there before in favour of something cheerier. The problem is that it went against character motivations and ends up lacking the bite they could have had with something a bit more dismal. The movie could have really driven home the social commentary it was trying to bring and still have been satisfying to the viewers. (See the spoiler section for more on the ending.)

The effects in the movie are adequate, the script was decent and the acting was enjoyable. It could have been so much more though, and after reaching the ending, all I can see is wasted potential.

Final Score: 2 out of 5.

BEYOND THIS POINT ARE SPOILERS…TURN BACK IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM OR CARE ABOUT CHARACTER AND PLOT POINTS BEING REVEALED…

Here is my big problem with the ending. Willis’ character decides at the very last moment, after he’s confirmed that no operators will die, to wipe out the entire surrogate population. All at once, every surrogate in the U.S. shuts off and crumples to the ground. The cleanup of the bots would be horrendous, let alone the crashed cars and any collateral damage caused by said crashing vehicles. (I wonder if airplanes would have crashed too.) However, that’s not the biggest problem. According to the movie, you have a society that has lived for several years through their surrogates. They have adjusted to doing next to nothing for themselves. To take all of that away at once would cause widespread panic. People wouldn’t know what to do with themselves anymore, and having to face their own unperfected face in the mirror day after day would likely drive some people mad. Suicide rates would probably skyrocket and the work force would be all kinds of screwy. Jobs that could once be completed by robots might be completely unmanageable for a human. You are talking about a complete infrastructure change because one guy decided to pull the plug.

The more poignant ending would have been the character protecting the life he knew. To choose to continue this distant existence through a robot. It may not have been the sappy “he and his wife are truly reunited” ending that they had, but it would have made more sense and had far more impact.