A cliché in a cliché in a cliché

Rating: Null/10 (13 September 2011)

So: Hack Snyder finally made the movie he always wanted to make. Good for him. I was very much looking forward to it, expecting a stylish CGI-rip-off of Tarantino's ass-kicking in a limitless dream-like fantasy-world inside a dream ... inside a dream. And that's exactly what I got and I was very pleased but then I found out I had watched Inception instead. Then I got around to Mr. Snyder's effort and I really have to say: I feel quite sorry for him and all the geeks and nerds he tried so desperately to please with a script and a movie that borders on criminal negligence for everything original or new. So Snyder wanted to make Brazil but Gilliam beat him to it, he wanted to do Moulin Rouge but an Australian guy was faster and he always dreamed of doing "Kill Bill" but even that one had been made a couple of years earlier. Bad luck. But no reason at all to turn those films into a horrible stew and garnish it with gruesome actors or sad has-beens (ok, granted: Scott Glen looks a little bit like David Carradine in Kill Bill and Snyder couldn't get Carradine as Carradine was dead, lucky him) It was like I could predict every line before it was spoken. "What if we get killed?" one scantily clad girl asks. "We are already dead" I sighed in my head. "We are already dead" said another scantily clad girl on the screen. They fall from a great hight and I go: "Please, god of movies, don't let them land in that crappy anime-style stance, one leg spread out straight, one arm raised high, looking cool to the ground, but, alas, of course they do. They must. Because this movie survives on unoriginality. Why a girl that get's institutionalized for NOT being insane has constant insane fantasies and swaps her mental asylum with a whorehouse from the twenties I will never know. Does that horrible fantasy make the horrible reality more bearable? And that crappy music. The whole film was like one of those bad mix-tapes by guys who don't know anything about music but think they do. Brrr. All the "cool" bands but only their worst songs, or those overused in other movies, in horrible updated versions. (Oh yes, Snyder obviously always wanted to make Fight-Club too) I promised to kill myself if I ever had to listen to White Rabbit again, used in a dream-sequence. Luckily I didn't really mean it serious or I would be turf now. And the twist at the end? He nicked that from Gilliam who in turn had nicked it from Ambrose Bierce. And everybody saw that coming, even my wife. At the latest when Glen said ominously "The fifth thing you must find out for yourself. Only you will know!" The fifth secret ingredient that Snyder misses (as a script-writer at last) is talent, sadly...