THE LAST WITCH HUNTER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Hopefully the first and LAST!!!

"I'm hoping this franchise can transform me into a Steve Reeves for the New Millennium."

The Last Witch Hunter (2015)
Dir. Breck Eisner
Starring: Vin Diesel (dubbed "Not His Real Name" by the late, great film critic John Harkness), Michael Caine, Rose Leslie, Elijah Wood, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

One doesn't go to a movie entitled The Last Witch Hunter expecting a masterpiece, especially when its lead is played by Vin ("Not His Real Name") Diesel, the bald, vaguely simian wiseacre star of the Fast and Furious and XXX franchises who, it seems, is seeking a whole new persona to exploit in yet another potential franchise. In fact, one expects something considerably lower on the rung when its revealed that the director will be Breck (Sahara, The Crazies) Eisner, a man who has yet to direct anything resembling a good movie.

In spite of these strikes against it, one grits ones teeth and hopes the movie will at least be fun on the level of 50s/60s Italian sword and sandal epics starring the likes of Steve Reeves. For the first few minutes, with Diesel traipsing about some Middle Ages fantasy setting with a ludicrous bushy beard and wielding a humungous sword, one believes that the modest hopes one had going in might blossom into something a bit more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, Diesel's character is defeated by the head honcho of all witches and cursed with eternal life and banished to an eternity of always remembering he didn't avenge the murder of his wife and child. That said, he becomes a witch hunter and, for a few hundred years he's been decimating "bad" witches all over the place.

"Look, this babe behind me has such a bad speech impediment I can't understand a word she says. Can we use some witchcraft to fix this up?"

For the rest of this movie, Diesel (sans beard) lives high atop the city in a swanky Manhattan pad and continues his vendetta against witches who refuse to live peacefully with humans. He even has a sidekick in the form of a Catholic priest played by Michael Caine (who no doubt earned a sizeable cheque to pay for a few more mansions in the sky). When Sir Michael is savagely tortured and left for dead, Diesel not only gets mad, he's going to get even. Related to this injustice is the fact that some bad witches are about to release a plague upon New York, so the Diesel-meister is going to have his hands full. The Catholics, always on top of such matters, give him a new Holy mortal sidekick in the form of a young priest (Elijah Wood) who means well, but is lacking the know-how of his predecessor.

Even all this might have been palatable if it wasn't for the fact that the movie gets increasingly convoluted and stupid. Stupid is fine, but once its commingled with convolutions, it becomes deadly. Add to this an uninspired villain (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) and a horrendous leading lady (Rose Leslie, she of the speech impediment which renders all her lines to mush and a grating high-pitched voice which is probably enough to send canines the world over into a tizzy rivalling the silent dog whistles one can buy from ads at the back of comic books) and worst of all, a character working both sides of the good/evil coin that we can see from the first minute he appears on screen, we know - beyond a shadow of any doubt - that this picture is going to be a boring stinker.

One of the most repulsive screen kisses in recent memory.

Eisner's non-direction proves he's not even grasped basic skill sets to put him in hack territory. He simply has no idea of where to place his camera and the action scenes are all a miss-mashed mess.

Diesel has apparently announced a sequel is in the works. Let's hope it quietly goes the way of the Dodo. That said, I'd be up for a Fast and Furious sequel which offers Diesel in full-on sword-and-sandal beard. Now that, could be a howler worth enjoying.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: * One-Star

The Last Witch Hunter is a Lions Gate production in release world wide via eOne.

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Rodriguez-Miller Noir Sequel Too Little, Too Late

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
Dir. Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Josh Brolin, Eva Greene, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Powers Boothe, Julia Garner, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Jamie Chung, Dennis Haysbert, Bruce Willis, Stacy Keach, Christopher Meloni, Jeremy Piven, Christopher Lloyd, Jamie Chung, Marton Csokas, Ray Liotta, Juno Temple, Jude Ciccolella, Jaime King, Alexa PenaVega, Lady Gaga

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The biggest sin this movie commits is being more boring than a soused, fat, old, skunk-pussy whore trying to pathetically coax a hard-on from a flaccid dick, but failing miserably with every attempt to inspire even a half-mast to poke through the globs of cellulite folding over a fetid, purulent orifice of love. This is especially disappointing since nine-years-ago, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller grabbed us by the short and curlies with the stylish, audacious and supremely entertaining Sin City. This time around, the neo-noir magic just isn't there. In fairness, the overwrought visual palette of high-contrast black & white splashed with snot-balls of garish colour hasn't lost its appeal, nor has the extreme violence. What's dishearteningly awry in this installment of short, loosely-connected pulp stories is that they're simply no match for the compelling, original nastiness that slugged us repeatedly in the face like a solid pistol-whipping that felt like it was never going to end. In fact, we didn't want it to end. I would have been happy for Rodriguez and Miller to keep smacking away at my flabby mug with some cold, hard, black steel. Here, though, we're constantly compelled to check the time on our smart phones every ten minutes or so and on occasion, the temptation to open up a game app like Bejeweled is stronger than the pull of the thundering Niagara Falls when you insanely hop the barrier and creep too close to the edge.

Alack and alas, the five stories in this prequel/sequel are simply not as good as those in the previous outing and the hard boiled overripe dialogue feels way more machine-tooled. The latter element jackhammers away at us with such force that it pretty much numbs us to the few decent lines peppered throughout.

Happily, Rodriguez and Miller don't save the best for last. The first tale, "Just Another Saturday Night" genuinely captures a fair bit of the old magic and sets us up to expect a ride as crazed and original as the first. We focus on everyone's favourite pug-ugly muscle-packed hood Marv (Michey Rourke) flaked out on a lonely stretch of highway overlooking The Projects and he's got no idea why he's there. The dead bodies strewn about provide enough clues to retrace his steps from earlier in the evening. His adventure-laden flashback includes ogling Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) gyrating onstage at Kadies, stopping some rich young scumbags from torching a drunk, stealing a police car in pursuit of the well-to-do filth, following them into the projects and engaging in a delicious spree of mayhem.

So far, so good. It's just after this point where, aside from a handful of bright spots, our hearts sink. "The Long Bad Night (Part I)" isn't bad, mind you. Johnny (Joseph Gordon Levitt) joins a card game in Kadie's back salon which is presided over by A-1 dirt-bag Senator Roarke (Powers Booth). With babe Marcie (Julia Garner) in tow for good luck, Johnny cleans up. The Senator is pissed at being humiliated. A big secret is soon revealed. A certain someone gets their fingers broken with a pair of pliers. And revenge, is sworn. Close, but no cigar with this tale, and we're on to the next dark segment.

"A Dame to Kill For" is surprisingly the weakest of the bunch. Too bad it's the centre-piece. A prequel to the first film's glorious "The Big Fat Kill", the story features the pre-plastic surgery Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin). He was played by Clive Owen in the previous picture and Brolin is a decent enough replacement. Unfortunately this long, deadly-dull tale involves his old flame Ava Lord (Eva Green) hinting at needing protection from her sexual deviant rich hubby Damian Lord (Marton Csokas) and the powerful manhandling Manute (Dennis Haysbert, replacing the late, great Michael Clarke Duncan). The convolutions involve a whack of femme fatale manipulations, a couple of cops Mort (Christopher Meloni) and Bob (Jeremy Piven), one of whom goes rogue, the return of hot whore Gail (Rosario Dawson, looking very bored) plus the deadly assassin Miho (Jamie Chung, a lame replacement for Devon Aoki). There's a too-short appearance by Stacy Keach as the sweating, corpulent, repulsive mobster Wallensquist and even a supernatural angle involving witchcraft.

The whole thing plays out like molasses.

The only decent stuff is the first few minutes involving Juno Temple as a whore marked for death by a slimy Ray Liotta, but it's disappointingly short and dispatched ingloriously in favour of and as a lead-in to the aforementioned nonsense with Ava. Eva Green is often wonderful, in spite of how dreadful this segment is and it might be great to see an entire feature devoted to her character. Green, to be blunt, is definitely as boner-inducing, if not more so than in Zack Snyder's 300.

"The Long Bad Night (Part II)" is a completely inconsequential tale of Johnny's attempted revenge upon Roarke and its only pleasures are to be found in Christopher Lloyd's great cameo as a heroin-shooting private doctor whom Johnny hires to straighten out his broken fingers.

"Nancy's Last Dance" involves our gyrating stripper "daughter" of Bruce Willis (who appears as - I kid you not - a ghost) and her desire to kill Roarke who's eventually going to rub her out to avenge the death of his "Yellow Bastard" son from Sin City. And no, this is not a case of best-for-last, but thanks to a great sequence with Marv and Nancy zipping along on their respective motorcycles and a genuinely decent blood bath in Roarke's mansion, the tale is more akin to being not-bad-for-last.

Powers Boothe, by the way, is always terrific as Roarke and he, like Eva Green, demands his own movie.

The addition of 3-D adds nothing and as per usual, renders everything murky in all the wrong ways.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** 2-Stars

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is an e-One release. It's also a humungous flop at the box office.

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THE WORLD'S END - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Alcoholism is seldom a laughing matter, nor is this movie.

The World's End (2013) *
Dir. Edgar Wright
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Rosamund Pike, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I don't believe in Sacred Cows. For me - everything - and I do mean everything can be funny. Context and form are, however, important factors in the notion of finding humour in all things and I must admit to a considerable degree of intolerance when it comes to plumbing the depths of alcohol abuse for fun.

W.C. Fields was always able to get away with it because his very being was a self awareness in his own alcoholism - we responded to the sad sack misanthrope who sought solace in booze to keep himself sane in a less than sane world and the bitterly funny irony of a bona fide disease being both the cause and cure of his almost hate-filled view of a world rife with hypocrisy and repression. Fields always rode the line separating heartache from hilarity, but with his toe dipped in the latter.

The World's End, a new film from the Shaun of the Dead team, is probably a work that its creators had hoped would rise above surface ambitions to generate laughs from an all night pub crawl, but the content is seriously amiss and the form ill-equipped to handle the full ramifications of its subtextual goals. This is a movie that wants to have it too many which-ways and ends up serving none of them on a satisfactory level.

Co-writer and star Simon Pegg plays Gary, a forty-something ne'er–do–well who manages to convince his old chums to follow him back to the stomping grounds of their youth in order to recreate and actually finish a booze-up odyssey they failed to completely fulfill some twenty years earlier. His friends all have jobs, families and/or responsibiities, while Gary has eschewed all semblance of normalcy for a life of adolescent hedonism long after the point that such activities tend to feel pathetically juvenile.

Once assembled in the hamlet of their younger days, the goal is to hit every pub in one night and make it to the Holy Grail of pubs, The World's End. Along the way, old resentments and rivalries begin to rear their ugly heads and the men are forced to confront demons they long ago forced into the closet. What makes this entire indulgence somewhat disparate from other tales of pathetic middle aged men trying to recreate their youth is the slow realization that all is not right in the place they left behind two decades earlier.

Ye Olde Towne has, you see, been insidiously taken over by a New World Order that's not of this Earth, so in addition to the aforementioned emotional gymnastics threatening the sacred bonds of male camaraderie, the boys find themselves up against a cross between the pod-people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the hideous underbelly masked by human flesh in They Live.

The entire movie is wrapped in a thematic ribbon which suggests how we can never truly turn back the clock of time and go home again to long-ago halcyon days of yore, but if we do, it's important to save the world from alien invasion.

On paper, this sounds a whole lot better than it actually is. The biggest problem is the movie's fey lightheartedness with respect to its central character Gary (and by extension, the proceedings of the whole film). We're supposed to love this pathetic adolescent in a man's body and admire his "freedom" which, the filmmakers juxtapose sharply with the staid, mainstream lives of his chums. Why this doesn't work is that Gary is pretty much a loser in his own way, as are his friends in their own fashion. Granted, the screenplay by Pegg and director Wright allows for some requisite skin-deep tut-tutting towards Gary's life choices, but ultimately, the filmmakers want us to be on Gary's side 100% as he rallies his chums to finish a 20-year-old pub crawl.

The movie is uncomfortably perched upon a fence post and as such, The World's End is never as funny as the filmmakers want it to be (I personally didn't crack a single smile, never mind a chuckle, laugh or guffaw). As well, the dramatic elements are impossible to swallow in any legitimate fashion and the science-fiction thriller side of things never takes flight the way in which the horror elements did so effectively in Shaun of the Dead. Most of all, the aesthetic pole-sitting reveals a huge missed opportunity that might have moved the film into the kind of satirical social observation it so desperately required to work beyond the trifle that it is.

The whole backdrop of British pub culture is an interesting one as it historically has provided one of the richest breeding grounds for the disease of alcoholism - one that not only flourished within the island borders of the United Kingdom, but extended well beyond into the colonial empire whereupon it tainted huge swaths of indigenous peoples. One might argue the social virtues of the pub culture, but the reality is that it sadly provided (and indeed, continues to provide) the habit-forming stimulus that leads to a horrible, debilitating disease.

One senses Pegg and Wright are trying to reach further, but one suspects they're either lacking the sophistication and craft of better filmmakers or they succumbed to a myriad of creative fingers in their pie. It's not impossible to achieve a higher purpose, but it requires a firm commitment on the part of its creative team to take no prisoners - a stance successfully maintained by others over a wide variety of successful works, though clearly not employed by Pegg and Wright.

The excess of American reliance upon all manner of stimuli to the emotional bandages provided by booze and drugs were indelibly captured by Terry Gilliam in his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas nightmare and even Britain, during its cinematic New Wave during the early-to-mid-60s was able to successfully delve into the effects of socially accepted forms of inebriation amongst all the "Angry Young Man" pictures generated by the likes of Karel Reizs, Tony Richardson, Richard Lester and Lindsay Anderson. Alas, Pegg and Wright, sadly, seem to be lost as to what kind of movie it is they want to make. Like any of the aforementioned filmmakers, they needed to have the courage and commitment to take a stand.

Gary's character, for example, is clearly an alcoholic and the pub-crawling activities are but one symptom of this ultimately debilitating disease, but instead of taking us onto the far more challenging paths into hearts of darkness, Pegg and Wright are content to pay lip-service to the humanity of the world they've created and most annoyingly, place far too much emphasis upon overwrought laugh-wrenching from the booze-swilling fake camaraderie engendered by the activity of pub crawling.

The whole affair is, however, far too inconsequential to inspire anything - especially that which might best be expressed as violently vehement moral outrage over the cavalier treatment of a debilitating disease and the pathetically empty lives of all the film's characters (not just Gary, frankly). Instead, we sit in the cinema, mouths agape at all the squandered opportunities for a film that could and should have been several steps forward for a clearly talented pair of collaborators.

"The World's End" is currently in theatrical release via E1 Films.