Omni's Random Video Noise

The Crow is a fun movie. There's little else to say.

It's a very straightforward guy-comes-back-from-the-dead-to-take-revenge plot and while there's little to no tension in whether or not Eric Draven can survive his homicidal spree against the gang of thugs that killed him (because he's invincible), he certainly makes it entertaining, being both smug, humorous, and daring to the point of suicidal were it not for the fact that he can't die.

When he just strolls into their hideout and just plops his ass on the end of the table, crossing his legs, I gotta grin. That's what I'd do. I'd get the MOST out of my invulnerability.

Unfortunately the movie drags on me in all the typical ways plus a few more: Cats, Crows, Eggs, Hotdogs, Cockroaches, Marriage, Engagement Rings, ending the movie on the line "real love is forever" EGCKH.

Also a couple leaps of logic like, how do they figure out the crow keeps Draven alive? That's an assumption based on ONE encounter and NO evidence.

Also when does Draven figure out he can take memories, let alone give them? That's... either a Deus Ex Machina or close to one.


Maybe there were supposed to be more scenes before Brandon Lee died, but HEY, it's surprisingly coherent despite, you wouldn't think to look at it, and I think that's commendable, not just because you can't tell he wasn't there for it's entirety, but he went out playing a memorable and likable character.

It kinda gives the whole "living dead" thing a bit of a twist too.

Arguably contending most heavily with the Police Story series, Jackie Chan's Drunken Master 1 & 2 (known as The Legend of Drunken Master) is one of the most popular martial arts movies out there.

What do I think? Well...

There's that whole movie part... and it just keeps getting in the way!

Save an early fight scene which is neat if not for the horrifically rubbery weapons, it takes about half of the movies runtime for us to final get some serious fighting, let alone drunken boxing.

The center of the movie suffers from an extraordinarily drawn out scene in which Chan's character, Fei-Hong is uselessly drunk, his mother lies incessantly to his father, and his father goes on a tirade over their drunkeness and lies. It goes on FOREVER even playing into an unfunny joke about her feigning pregnancy to get avoid getting hit ( ( o_O).

My general gripe with the movie is just the whole drunken boxing aspect. It means that Chan's supposed to act drunk and what that means is a whole lot of overracting which is partly funny, but mostly annoying.


Once the "get out of my house" scene plays out it's mostly fight scenes with the local smugglers till the end of the movie. The Axe Gang fight and the final showdown with "John" (Ken Lo) in the mine are particular highlights.

The Axe Gang fight features the iconic moment in which Jackie fends off numerous armed opponents with a split bamboo chute and altogether just utterly destroys a house. Character, Fu Wen Chi also dies like a cartoon at the end of it.

Jackie Chan vs. Ken Lo, one about the wicked kicks and the other about the drunken boxing is undoubtedly a scene to behold especially when Jackie boozes up on... something he shouldn't be drinking and goes ****ing ******* on the dude. You kinda feel sorry for the bad guy by the end of it, he never really had a chance.

If nothing else watch those clips on Youtube or something, in fact, Here. You. Go:

Contending for one of the greatest martial arts movies of all time, Tony Jaa's The Protector (or more appropriately titled "The Attacker" or "Tom-Yum-Goong" after the restaurant that is central to the movie) has nearly all the qualities you could want in one.

You got a warehouse fight against skate and bicycle enthusiasts, you got a rapid-fire showdown against a swordsman, MMA fighter, and a capoeira specialist (bonus points for that one ), you got a scene in which the main character singlehandedly cripples a room full of some 50 guys (a lot of bone-breaking sound effects followed shortly by a lot of tendon-cutting that's... kinda hard to watch), and best of all you got a 4+ minute long-take of Tony Jaa just storming a several story restaurant, throwing people off balconies, kicking them down stairs, putting people's heads through walls, glass, and vases, all culminating in the movie's first serious one-on-one fights which are also quite entertaining.

The fighting itself isn't anywhere near as complex as what you'd get with Jackie Chan, but it's suitably brutal when it's not flubbing mock punches.


There's a crappy CG historical flashback scene and a couple obvious composite shots, but the between-action scenes are mercifully brisk and just barely rationalize some sort of police corruption plot.

UNFORTUNATELY, this is where the other shoe drops because if you know anything about the plot already it's that the movie's basically "Dude, Where's My Elephant?".

Our character supposedly "cares" for elephants insofar as you can care for a creature you've specifically bred for war, and they get stolen by a crime syndicate who, in a morbid revelation, are revealing to be running a black market restaurant that sells dishes made of exotic and endangered animals. SO NOT ONLY do we have several Elephants in the movie, but we also have Monkeys, Turtles, Bats, Snakes, Pangolins, CG Scorpions, and probably other sorry critters I couldn't make out.

NNNNNO.

NNNNNO.

NNNNNNNNNNO.

If the animals were all CG (as in good CG) and the elephants weren't specifically war elephants, I could forgive it, but NOT HERE.

Way to ruin a good thing.

Fish, Fishing, Horses.

Come, my children, grab a mat and sit as your lecherous old grandpa tells you the tale of a young girl and her story...

It all begins with a MAN. A stupid old man who having seen too many battles vows to create a team of assassins for the purpose of killing warlords so as to prevent war from ever happening again.

He collects 10 orphans, among which is Token Girl, Azumi, and raises them to be assassins. He then demands that they pair up with the one they like most and kill them. Because to stop killing... you must KILL.

He and the 5 then venture off on their undisclosed mission to kill all warlords. They encounter a bandit raid and he graces upon them, with his wealth of wisdom, the words, "killing bandits won't change a nation". Perfectly true, to stop war the only path is murder, and the only path to murder is apathy, so next time you see somebody in trouble, DON'T interfere. Even if it's a slaughter you could easily prevent, do nothing. Only then will atrocities like this be stopped.

Azumi comes upon a seemingly kind man and kills him and his entire party. YES, that is more war prevented. The death of the man reaches the ears of his superior who immediately suspects a blameless foreign power and plans for war. When Azumi and co. find and kill his body double, he sends out a most respected group of assassins to assassinate the assassins. They immediately find unarmed traveling performers and chase them down despite the fact that they don't match the description and there are "too many girls and not enough men".

Azumi and co. manage to only save one girl who is privileged to watch her forced love interest die at the hands of an Evil Bishie. Azumi wishes to avenge him, but the girl insists that "girls don't talk like that" and "somebody else can do it, it doesn't have to be you". Mmmm yes, sexism and cowardice do make for the most compelling drama.

So too, incidentally, does blood geysers. Did you know this was based on a manga? It's an excellent manga. Imagine if they retroactively applied blood geysers to the manga...

There's also an unnatractive ninja named "Monkey" who is dubbed with monkey noises. Surely a merit no movie should be without.

Sadly, no amount of lesbian undertones and rape can sheathe Azumi's sword and she soon rejoins the fight to bring down the one-and-only warlord of any concern: the one they specifically antagonized.

When she arrives at the Big Bad's fort she witnesses her Master, crucified and slit across the throat followed by Evil Bishie's provocation "you must come or he'll die". NO MORE EPIC A CHALLENGE HAS EVER BEEN SPOKEN, to think that her Master, who forced her to kill her friends, who abandoned civilians to be raped and murdered, who instigated a war, and is now bleeding from a mortal wound...
MIGHT DIE.

Such an affront shall not stand. Azumi takes their entire army on almost single-handedly with the help of no less than masterfully inconsistent continuity and exquisitely transparent wire-fu.

The bad guys, who have thus far done nothing wrong, even TURN ON EACH OTHER thanks to their archers' and gunmens' Stormtrooper Shooting Lessons. Evil Bishie even kills several of his own in a blood frenzy before pulling a rose out of his ass and getting decapitated in gloriously computer-generated fashion... but not before Hideo Kojima grabs his balls.


With everyone else inexplicably dead (even though I'm pretty sure some of them were only kicked to the ground), Azumi approaches her Master who's still inexplicably alive. He tells her the most emotionally damning words in any movie I've yet seen:

"It's over."

I can already tell those two words have brought you to tears. After losing all of her friends and her Master, after she stood by and watched as countless pedestrians suffered extremely preventable deaths, and now after personally slaughtering an entire army of people who've never wronged her... it's finally over. It's all over.

Everyone's dead.

Except for the one guy they were trying to kill who's gonna start a war, he escaped on a boat, but EVERYONE ELSE IS DEAD.

Azumi weeps for her master before we cut to the Big Bad, in the middle of the ocean, having an extremely conspicuous Villain Laugh. Azumi appears, bone-dry, over the side of the boat and slays him, escaping back out into the water with no sign of any boats for her to have gotten there in the first place with.

Sudden jumpcut back to the fort, still full of corpses and in her old dry clothes, she discovers one of her friends inexplicably survived a point-blank explosion and swears to him that she will continue her senseless murderous rampage for peace... IN THE SEQUEL.


And so, children, that was the story of Azumi, a nubile and strangely attractive young girl with no personality or drive to question her elders. And in that spirit I have a game I would like to play with you... it's lots of fun, I promise. Grandpa's going to touch you somewhere and you can't tell Mommy, okay?

I swear I nearly quit right there.

Sausage, Dogs, The Man From Nowhere is as wildly mislabeled as a martial arts movie as it is wildly underwhelming.

Save a pretty bad opening 20 minutes and a pretty good ending 20 minutes, it's all around dull. Certainly more emotionally charged and more narratively straightforward than your average action thriller it still fails to develop more than one or two characters out of the dozens of recurring cast members.

Even as an action movie there's very little action to be had, just tension. VERY MILD tension. The end showcases a noteworthy one-v-all knife fight in which our main character grapples and severs ligaments with a unpleasant efficiency, and for the most part he's pretty cool in the few action scenes he's in, but again these scenes are very brief and often suffer from quick-cut shaky cam or simply having him beat up people off-screen.

The drama itself is nothing special either, he's just a stock brooding ex-black ops who lost his wife in a hit on his life blahblahblah and he finds a connection with a neighbor girl who gets kidnapped for drugs and pushed into the organ trade... eh... There's a couple moments of genuine emotion, but it's mostly emotionless blathering back and forth from plot beat to plot beat.

I think the most impressive thing about the movie is probably a single seamless camera shot which follows our hero behind the back out of a second story window to the ground without faltering. It didn't look like a hand cam or a steady cam so... props. I dunno how you did that but it was neat.

Otherwise though, if you're looking for something exceptional, search elsewhere. This is most certainly not worth your time.

Fish, Oysters, Dolphins, Chicken, "Love", and Kissing.

So WHAT HAPPENS when Jackie Chan stars in, writes, and produces a movie? You get Gorgeous. A bizarre little romcom a with smattering of martial arts straight down the middle.

So how does this play out? Well, then 45-year-old Jackie Chan plays a rich stock investor/boxer bachelor (jesus) who conveniently finds himself pestered by his servants to "find a girl" at precisely the exact same time that then 23-year-old Shu Qi plays a much younger girl craving romance.

Naturally when Chan is jumped by an old friend of his who sends goons to kill him over what we eventually come to learn is over nothing more than a styrofoam business, because it's "bad for the environment" (what!?), Qi runs away from home to save Chan, gets stranded on an island with him, develops some whimsical-as-**** chemistry while the audience ponders in the back of their head, <her parents must be worried sick>.

There's a whole lot of romcommy shtick including a flamboyant gay man played by Tony Leung (the undercover cop in Hard Boiled) and hijinks resulting from Chan's friend's goons whose cookiness is played for laughs.

The chemistry between Jackie and Shu is surprisingly good at first, but it quickly devolves from 'chemistry' to 'creepy' with lines from him like "I enjoy watching you eat." to which she reciprocates, justifying her affection with lines like "He likes girls and he's successful.".

Heheheheheheheheheheee... You know who ELSE fits that description?
NORMAN BATEMAN.


It has all the predictable bits: the chance encounter, the false date, the friends talking her down, the ACTUAL letdown- and let me tell you, this scene is just ****in' terrible.

Drive a stake in my heart why donchya?

No, seriously. Kill me now, this dialog is horrendous.

And you know what may be the worst part about? That scene takes place in an assembly line factory and THERE ISN'T A FIGHT SCENE.

There are about 4 fight scenes in the movie.

One on the boat which uses Chan's jacket as a prop.

One out in an alley which does some sick things with baseball bats.

And then there's the initial loss and rematch between Chan and... Brad Allen's character.


Brad is just some guy on Chan's stunt team (he's actually the team leader), but his appearance as the main antagonist to Chan is great. He's humorously introduced in a manner which suggests he'll defeat Chan by being bigger than him (because those giant foreign people you know?), but the joke is he's actually quite a good head or so shorter than him. Chan doesn't take him seriously and that's when Brad just turns on badass mode and goes "You don't have a choice", ultimately whooping Chan's ass.

After Chan's unspoken breakup and depression he opts to get out of his funk which a rematch against Brad which is an excellent example of how you can make an awesome one-on-one fight scene with virtually no props at all. There's also no narrative stakes in this fight either, it's just a friendly spar between two competitors and we even get some enjoyably human moments from Brad out of it who would otherwise be a very flat character.

At some point though, Chan sees an ad in some garbage that says "just smile" and after that point he continues fighting with a stupid grin on his face, understandably wigging out Brad. After that point it just goes all clownshoes on us with Chan implementing his "dance" practice on Brad (which is probably wildly humiliating to be gracefully rolled across Chan's butt) which incites the battle even further until they both literally go cross-eyed.

It's a dumb movie, but it features some good fights, some great fights, and barely manages to survive the rest on frequent injections of genuine character humor. I'd say the good just manages to outpace the bad.

But I'm also cynical as **** and don't really believe anything I say.

Crap. I'm not sure how to describe what I'm feeling.

...let me try drawing something.





There's NOTHING HERE, I mean where's the personality? Zotis was talkin' this one up as "over-the-top" and, you know, from a certain perspective I can see that, but meeeenneeeehhhh I'M THINKIN' ARMY OF DARKNESS OVER-THE-TOP, right? Not... THIS.


I mean it's just this wildly undercooked dirty cop plot that sets up the story mixed in with a barely-there-brothers-on-opposite-sides-of-the-tracks subplot and zrzgrzrgzrgr I don't give a ****. I don't like ANYBODY, I'm never given a reason to like anybody except-what our main character? Why? Because he's Muslim?

Am I supposed to champion this surrogate entity of violence against totally random goons? That's not a point in the movie's FAVOR.

And you know I really wouldn't mind a straightforward nearly plotless action movie with a nameless protagonist just kicking ass, but AGAIN some personality! I feel like we just stuffed a B-list stuntman into Silent Hill and sent all of the most boring goons in the Big Bad's arsenal to **** him up. It's visceral, but viscerality (visceralness? visceration?) is unpleasant in large doses and this is nothing but GREYS, bullets stacking up bodies, and people getting knifed up and down their thighs.

A close-up of some guy whose name I don't know or care about crawling on the ground and repeatedly stabbing another guy who name I don't know or care about does NOTHING FOR ME EXCEPT TELL ME THAT THE CREATORS LIKE SEEING BLADES SLIDE IN AND OUT OF FLESH.

And REALLY, that's not me. I'm not in this for the CG blood splatter, the body count, or the ugly visuals besides. I'm just here to see a likable character kick some ass and look cool doing it.

Wanna raise the stakes? Awesome.
Wanna put him on the defense? Awesome.
Wanna make me FEAR for his life? Awesome, yes, do it.
Wanna make the soundtrack 90% the characters moaning "AEAEAEAEAEAEAEGGHGHHHGGHH"?

No. I'm good. And when it comes to one-vs-all scenarios, either the character should destroy the opposition CLEANLY (as in: no one can kill him, which makes him badass), or every enemy should pose a legitimate obstacle and threat to his life (as in: anyone could kill him, which makes him badass).

THAT'S how you do it. You either go Die Hard or you go Hard Boiled, none of this sitting-on-the-fence ****. It's boring.

Also, anyone else notice the corrupt cop dude trying to kill himself by sticking the gun under his chin and angling it at his teeth? You're not gonna kill yourself doing that dude, you're gonna blow your teeth out, **** up your jaw, mess up your nose, and IF YOU'RE LUCKY, you might tear out the artery beneath your tongue so you can bleed out slowly.

If you WANNA DIE, barrel to the temple.

Dog, Fishing, *reels from headache* I... **** this movie.

I didn't like it. I didn't like it. It was just... AGAIN some decent fight choreography, but the ****in' ugly aesthetic, the near total lack of characterization, and... what's WORSE is that you managed to **** up the best thing you had going for you in the first movie: The pace! The premise! The ****in' RAID!

It takes you TWO HOURS to get to anything that could conceivably be called a raid? Are ****in' kidding me? I don't care about this political crime syndicate ****, it takes me forever to figure out which characters I'm supposed to me focused on and once I'm focused on them it's just this flaccid plot about some uppity piece of **** mobster kid who wants to overthrow his dad yadayadayada alongside this thoroughly uninvolving main plot about Rama (whose name I finally remember) going undercover. There's no intrigue there's no... it's just AGAIN characters I don't know or care about backstabbing other characters I don't know or care about.

Who was the fuzzy old hobo guy who just HAPPENS to be a martial arts master?

Why does the mobster's son immediately suspect his business partner of planting the wire when Rama has already attacked his men once?

Why does he still shoot him when Rama's literally in the same room as him and trying to kill him after having murdered an entire building full of his people?

Why does he turn his back to do it?

Why does Rama let such an easy opportunity to end it pass?

Why is Rama even called a rookie when he can survive a gang, a crime syndicate, and police armed with knives?

Why are they armed with KNIVES? Why are we just handwaving the idea of police solving crimes by running out into the streets and STABBING PEOPLE?


I could let all of this go, but you failed not once, but TWICE now and this time worse than the first! What was so hard about this Raid concept that you practically ditched the premise in favor of bloating your dry scab of a story? Was the puke-yellow prison mud fight really that essential? Was the fact that the bad guys are filming strap-on anal porn in a disgusting building just... the ONE THING that was missing in the first movie? Is the extent of your creativity seriously a deaf girl beating a factory's worth of squibs out of people with hammers? Is that her specialty? Just claw hammers? You couldn't cheese it up a bit?

This humorless, bleak, bloody, ugly, boring piece of ****?

Here's what I WAS HOPING FOR, picture this:

Just like the first movie, we briefly setup the raid, right? Maybe the movie's a fancy resort hotel or something, okay? Something with a lot of different rooms. You could throw a gym or a pool or rationalize all sorts of **** for different settings and props. We compartmentalize each floor of the building (like we started doing in the first movie) and distinguish them by their different settings, props, or enemies. Certain floors could have ambushes, use a particular range of weapons, one floor could be filled with poisonous gas or covered with tacks, or be trapped, it could have lots of enemies or one really dangerous enemy, and we'd allow our character(s) to adapt, improvise, collect, and exploit the various obstacles on their way to the top. It could be like Dark Floors where every floor is thematically different and filled with it's own unique threats.

One character? Fighting his way through that? WOULD BE AWESOME.

Butchu couldn't even do that.

The Raid 2's not really what I would call BAD... but it's a disappointment, it ruthlessly boring, and it felt like a waste of my life.

Kissing, Dogs, Sheep, Cows.

It's apparent from Chan's first fight scene that this is not among his best offerings. His first fight features him pretending not to fight and "accidentally" beating up a group of thugs which would be swell in any other Jackie Chan movie, but here it's immediately obvious that the stunt guys aren't up to the task of playing with him as feints appear really obvious and attacks are brutally telegraphed.

It doesn't help that by the end of the movie he's going up against mainly MMA-type fighters in a tournament format and it almost descends to professional wrestling levels of acting. That's bad by my book. Not just the acting, but the total waste of such a concept.

The only thing that saves any of these fights is obviously Jackie Chan with his occasional dose of humor and obsessively creative use of props. It's really the only thing that keeps these fights interesting, and even then, unless I had incredibly low standards for fight choreography, these aren't exceptional in any way, but I've seen Drunken Master 2 and these just barely manage to tread water.

The whole "most fights" thing is also a bit misleading in that fights not even including Chan are counted, they're almost all very brief, and there's maybe only two or three before the "Battle Creek Brawl" even begins.

I think the only noteworthy things in this movie is the totally unexpected relay-race-on-skates and The Dragon who inexplicably earns boos from the crowd by deeply kissing his victims, which of course Chan reciprocates when he beats him.

This about sums up the movie's problems:

Dogs, Horses, Pelicans, Kissing, Wedding Rings, let's get the complaints out of the way.

So Arnold's secretly a government spy, which he hides from his family and in his inevitable absence he discovers that his daughter is stealing from him and his wife has bought into the thrills of a con artist (Bill Paxton playing a used car salesman). His friend and partner annoyingly offers insensitive advice including a particularly ****** line about how his daughter is probably stealing from him so she can pay for an abortion.

Dude. **** you.

I'm glad Arnold yells at him to "stop cheering me up", but I'dve just socked the ****er. The movie really seems to think this guy's an ace comedy relief since it's even his constant banter which ends the movie, and this combined with the unfortunate horse scene in which Arnold attempts to force a horse to jump him across two sidewalks and a 4-lane street to another building, after which he scolds the poor animal for refusing just makes for a... stained first 40 minutes.

AFTER the first 40 minutes what makes an average Schwarzenegger movie becomes a good Schwarzenegger movie. Arnold discovers that his wife, Jamie Lee Curtis, is secretly involved with Bill Paxton's character and while I naturally cringe at the inevitable Monogamy Syndrome, it... never really hits. Paxton's character is easy to dislike and the movie's quick to explain that Curtis just wants a little excitement in her life and Arnold's able to offer it. Sadly, there's no scene of the two characters explicitly sharing in that they lied to each other and that bygones should be bygones, but resolution comes eventually anyway with no small amount of finagling on Arnold's part compounded with the actual terrorist plot that drags his family into it.

Honestly, while Arnold's his usual enjoyable self, I think the real star here is Jamie Lee Curtis who does a fantastic job of playing the sheltered housewife awkwardly but determinedly roleplaying her way into a spy fantasy. Before it becomes a spy reality of course.