Live-Action R-rated "Lion King"

Rating: 5/10 (6 May 2000)

Uhhhhgggg! What the Hell was that? All this movie was missing was Russell Crowe on his knees in the middle of his destroyed home shouting at the sky: "NOOooooooooooooooo!" a la Charlton Heston in "Planet of The Apes." It's kind of a Roman-period-piece-meets-Braveheart-meets-Lion King-meets-any-Van-Damme movie.
Ya got yer costumes-- ya got yer battles -- ya got yer PC circle-of-life thing (complete with circle-of-life soundtrack) -- ya got yer "ya-killed-my-family!" revenge thing going on. There's even a bad guy that's only a few thumb-suckles away from being Prince John in Disney's "Robin Hood." Oh, and fer the "adults" yah got some complicated politics a personal redemption story and unrequited love and stuff. If this explication sounds like a mishmash, it's because that's what this movie is.
Some of the more laughable instances:
1) Germany, Spain, Rome & Morrocco? all less than 1-1.5 days horse-ride from each other.
2) Killer tigers that like to give juicy hero-types a big hug while the hero has time to feel for a good space between their ribs for a death-strike.
3) A bad guy who's about as dumb as a box of rocks. I was lauging out loud with my friend while he was giving his "busy-busy bee" speech. This guy gave me a new appreciation for Sting as Fayd Haarkonen in "Dune."
4) People who like to put dangerous poisonous cobras on a table for funsies. The snake did a *lot* of hissing, and I knew the foley artists where just *itchin'* to dub a rattle-snake-rattling sound into that scene.

5) Dead-meat slaves who get to massacre the rock group "Gwar" not once, but twice in a coliseum.
6) and many more too numerous to mention...
Constant happenstance and hokum punctuated with blood and barbarism do not a good movie make. Substitute the words "chaos" and "catastrophe" for "blood" and "barbarism" in the last sentence and you have a statement true of "Titanic." In fact, this film was far closer to "Titanic" than anything else I can remember. There's even a dead-person's-delight scene at the end -- just like in Titanic.
In fact, I could go so far as to say that "Titanic" was the "chick-flick" version of what this is, and "Gladiator" is a "guy-flick" version of "Titanic." Maybe the scripts were spit out of the same computer-program with the "Testosterone Mode" radio-button selected in the Preferences dialog-box.
Movies like "Ben Hur" and "Sparticus" shouldn't even be mentioned in the same paragraph as the film I've been writing about for the past 20 minutes... ;c)
10 possible
-1 for hokey Lion-King spiritualism.
-1 for doing the nearly all the standard action cliches.
-1 for the absolutely horrible villain.
-2 for variation on "Titanic" themes/feel.
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Rating: 5 "Yet Another Shlocky 'Blockbuster'"