Margarita Movies

We are still in the doldrums of movie releases. Although good films are starting to come back into season, a never-ending wave of shit is still flowing through American movie theatres. Excitingly, the film we have been waiting for for months and months is out this weekend - KILLER ELITE. The title alone makes it an automatic Margarita Movie must-watch, but it actually features Jason Statham fighting Clive Owen with a comedy porno moustache while things explode and Robert De Niro provides comic relief in the background. All this, and the trailer features Rock You Like A Hurricane. Team MM CANNOT FUCKING WAIT. Alas, that is tomorrow’s film. Today, Dan’s bizarre fascination with entertainment aimed at the teenage girl demographic had us seeing an entirely different film, so after a slightly more racist than usual pre-game bout of banter and slurs, during which Dan referred to Elton John as Elton Gay by accident, we were ready for the least manly action film of all time.

That’s right, someone important decided that the llama-faced werewolf kid from Twilight needed to branch out, and thus here he is, fronting an espionage action thriller. Good luck, werewolf kid! We were actually going to skip this one, but then for a time it was at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Han was like, oh, it is on now motherfucker.

Ok. So, at the start of the film, Werewolf Kid is a perfectly normal American teenager, i.e., a total cunt. He does dangerous thrill-seeking things, and goes to parties that seem, frankly, improbably cool. In American films where there are parties where teenagers are at, it’s always luxurious mansions and scores of stunningly beautiful women idly kicking it to the sounds of whatever the freshest DJ is at the time. Is this why Americans are so fucking insufferable? Is this what you all experience at all stages of your life? In the countries I grew up in, parties were grimy affairs in someone’s house, or a park, and generally everyone would get shitfaced and talk absolute idiocy at each other while absolutely nobody managed to talk to a girl. 75% of the time either the police or the fire department would show up and shut it all the fuck down, or on one memorable occasion, my parents would shit bricks that I had gone unwatched for an entire night and embarrassingly interrogate all my friends until they could discover I had woken up in bed next to a girl (sadly, not even remotely in a romantic capacity) and then shame me by dragging me out of there to later apply their fearsome wrath. What I am trying to say, is that parties were essentially crap, assembled by idiotic teenagers who did not know the first thing about how to successfully manage the fun-having process except to acquire the alcohol with the absolute best alcohol-to-cost ratio and imbibe as much of it as was possible before vomiting occurred. Is this the fundamental difference between Americans and the rest of the West?

Anyway blah blah teenager blah blah he likes a girl blah blah she has a boyfriend. Luckily her boyfriend is a violent and rageful young man, although so is Werewolf Kid, but apparently in a much more acceptably charming way. The Girl chucks the other kid and hey, guess what, she’s the leading lady. She’s also Phil Collins’ kid. I guess Werewolf Kid is going to be getting some IN THE AIR TONIGHT. If she’s too much of an EASY LOVER he might end up having A GROOVY KIND OF — alright, alright, sorry.

But then The Plot happens! Some mysterious goons invade the home of Werewolf Kid and his parents turn out to be secret ninjas and they all kill each other. Then one agent is like, BY THE WAY, we put a bomb in your microwave. He wasn’t wrong, either! The house explodes. 

Werewolf Kid goes ON THE LAM with The Girl. There are all kinds of totally appropriate times where he can put the moves on her and does not, and all kinds of times when it is wildly inappropriate, and he does.

It turns out it’s only the bloody Russians who are after Werewolf Kid, for some fucking reason. It turns out his parents were super-spies and the Russians want to go after a child that his parents have abandoned for 15 years to use as leverage against his still-living father. Makes sense! Before you can notice how flimsy this is, a Nokia MacGuffin N70 cellphone is introduced that contains a highly convenient encrypted list of names of traitorous Americans who have sold state secrets to the Russians. Nobody says “and there’s some evidence, too”. It’s just a list. So if the list is like, Barack Obama, Roddy McDowall, Wesley Snipes, Leonard Cohen, et cetera, do they just arrest all those people? I know they just throw people in Gitmo these days instead of having jury trials but you’d think you need more evidence than some Ruski’s dream make-out list.

They then get on a train! I think this whole train sequence is meant to rip off From Russia With Love, which it does pretty effectively, except without James Bond and without a Bond Girl. Some Russian bastard manages to get in Werewolf Kid’s cabin and they have an exciting bout of fisticuffs. Werewolf Kid eventually wins, and then after winning, kicks the window out and throws the Russian out of the train window. This is the most sensible thing he does at any time in the film.

There was some fucking gasping going on from the audience in this film. The average audience member at this film was a teenage girl, and they were PRETTY excited every time Werewolf Kid took his shirt off or was in jeopardy. I realised after an hour or so of this that to those girls, this film is Killer Elite.

Eventually it is arranged that Werewolf Kid must go to a baseball stadium and hand the list over to the head Russian (probably Vladimir Putin) and then he will… I don’t know, something. So there’s a tense yet retarded bit where the Russian casually eats popcorn while outsmarting Werewolf Kid, and then there’s the exciting pseudo-parkour scene from the trailer where he jumps down a sloping glass thing and ooh, we were all on the edges of our respective seats. Eventually Werewolf Kid leads Vladimir Putin outside, where his mysterious father snipes him to death from a distance. 

After this there’s a bit where friendly psychiatrist Sigourney Weaver turns up to adopt Werewolf Kid, and the dialogue in this bit is about on the level of a Japanese videogame cutscene. I saw Han unconsciously trying to press A to continue.

Argh! The trouble with Werewolf Kid as an action star is, his face. Every scene, he screws up his eyes like he’s staring directly into the heart of a thousand supernovas, and his only method of emoting is swivelling his head around like RoboCop. Long story short, I do not recommend this film.

This is the world we live in, and these are the hands we’re given, use them and let’s start trying, to make the SCALE Scale!

S - Story: I can’t help the feeling that I’ve seen this story before! A MILLION FUCKING TIMES. 3.

C - Comedy: A few half-hearted laughs, mostly rendered terrifying by Dan baring his chest at Han and I whenever Werewolf Kid took his shirt off, which was OFTEN. 4.

A - Awesomeness: On paper, it sounds like this film has some awesomeness. A dude breaks another dude’s neck, and people are getting shot, and hitting each other, but it’s all done in a way that’s the precise opposite way it would be done if it had a soundtrack by Pantera. 2.

L - Ladies: The only real female who hasn’t passed menopause in this film is Phil Collins’ daughter. I’m not sure if it’s legal to rate her at all so I have to give this film (X) for Ladies.

E - Et Cetera: The black kid in this film, who does not die, but does nothing else of note, is called Denzel Whitaker. Team MM is assuming that Forest Whitaker named his kid Denzel. This makes us laugh. 6.

-N

Tomorrow! KILLER FUCKING ELITE!