Gunpowder Clot

Rating: 4/10 (21 December 2008)

Sometimes; when reading the posts on IMDb, it becomes easier to see that common sense is possessed by a declining few.
Even to describe the plot of this second Guy Fawkes as 'preposterous in the extreme' would be an understatement.
One commentator has compared it to a production by Andrew Lloyd Webber. And given a few good songs, with the abandonment of all pretence at reality, it would have made a corking musical. A sort of 'Phantom Of The Revolution', with hints of Darth Vader, Obi Wan Kenobi, Neo, Adam Adamant, Bat Man, and The Joker all rolled into Winston Smith. As a piece of overblown, theatrical pomposity I can think of very few equals.
The problem is; it didn't stop there. It tried to be intelligent. And for under-fives may still seem so. It tried to be realistic; though the same class are unlikely to be fooled there. It also tried to convey a political message, with all the balance and intellectual depth of the Socialist Worker Party. Yep: that bad.
And I am SO tired of super-heroes, who can do just about anything. Where do they learn their skills? Where do they get their training? Why can't the SAS - who spend their lives in the business of all things espionage - do the same? There is a single-line hint that he was infected by a disease which miraculously advanced his strength and reaction times (yawn). It similarly made him a knife-throwing genius, a pyrotechnics expert, and a ghost who can pretty-well go anywhere without detection.
And of course; he's got to have 'issues' from the past, that require endless, tedious, soul-searching, chest-bearing denouements (double yawn).
To begin with; he's tapped into a communications main-frame. He's managed to smuggle about a ton of explosives into the Old Bailey, along with about £100,000 worth of display fireworks for good measure. He's managed to distribute them, conceal them, and fit them with minutely co-ordinated time-fuses. And he's apparently done this when anything bigger than a handbag is searched, and also scanned for explosive traces. Yeah, sure; in wonderland. And all the dumb-asses who've given this 8 or more stars just gawped open-mouthed in unquestioning acceptance. No explanation; just swallow like a garbage bin.
Reality ends there. It was not necessary to waste celluloid on any more hokey explanations. Just get on with the songs and the theatre.
But no; it just shuffles along. Tediously, laboriously, often presented from the standpoint of a senior detective with an IQ equal to his body temperature. The general public are depicted as the sort of gormless, gullible trinkets who consider this a good movie. We learn of his imprisonment, his escape, and so on. We don't need any of it; let's just have the songs!
We see the new big brother, played by an increasingly rabid John Hurt, which looks like a tongue-in-cheek homage to the 1984 movie. In a scene of unremitting confusion in a disused underground railway station, we find a train that's packed with yet more explosives. Our phantom hero has cleared the track and re-electrified it (that took him 10 years, you know). For some reason, once more unexplained, 'Big Brother' is dragged down there by his fellow authority-figures, to be murdered by the 'clot'. They then turn on him, and he proceeds to murder them all in a Tarantino-style blood bath. Though he is mortally wounded in the process.
Oh-yes; and there's the inevitable pretty-sweet femme-fatale who wanders about with her mouth partly agape as if in continuous expectation of providing someone with a blow-job. She, and she alone, carries this tall, well-muscled crusader onto the train and lays him on his explosives. Providing him with a wreath of red-roses, plucked out of fresh-air (if you can find any in a disused underground station).
The train is sent to Parliament, where the entire population of London, dressed in Guy Fawkes outfits - all supplied and shipped by courier at unlimited expense by our hero, have gathered to watch the big bang.
And it's a good one - the best bit of the movie. And there's another £100,000 fireworks display to go with it. To a few last lines uttered by the heroine, so clichéd as to pucker any self-respecting human sphincter, the nonsense comes to a close.
There's a lot more equally daft stuff but insufficient space to describe it.
Choreography's nice. Production values high. Special-effects spectacular, costumes and set-pieces OK. The hero is verbose but hilarious. The heroine suitably sylph-like, dumb and pretty. If only they'd remembered to put the bloody songs in. What a show it would have been.