Because a while back when the red band poster for this movie came out, I posted it while waving my hopes for Nick Cage and the snap back of Matt Vaughn after the horrible, horrible should have been good Stardust. I mean shit, a new age Princess Bride with Claire Danes as a directorial follow up to the nearly brilliant Layer Cake - how do you fuck that up? Wait, I know, you direct Bob DeNiro to play a gay pirate. Fucking sinister, the shit this guy put onto his screen - put out of his movie. At the time, I'm pretty sure I marked it in my head as unforgivable - and this was immediately after I had been touting him in my mind as someone I would follow for years and years and years. That kind of hope.
This movie. Kick Ass. This fucking movie. I was SO excited to be in that theater, SO fucking excited to love this movie. And then something remarkable happened. It fucking sucked. Brutal. Empty. Biting off Dark Knight, regurgitating fight sequences and compositions that have been getting passed around like Turkish whores through movies and trailers over the last 3 years. I mean really, still using John Murphy? Because that scene in 28 Weeks Later where Robert Carlyle abandons his wife to get ravaged on the English countryside and his running, screaming and crying across green pastures while getting chased by about a thousand fucking zombies was totally forgettable, wasn't it? And no one ever saw 28 Weeks Later, clearly. I was going to walk out about 40 minutes in before I decided I didn't want to make a scene. Then it got worse and I didn't want to walk out at 1:10 because I heard there was some uproar when my boy Roger Ebert apologetically bashed it and gave away some sort of great spoiler about the ending...so I stayed until the end. I stayed. I was not happy.
Matt Vaughn, congratulations though, you made a movie that is going to do really well this weekend. You made a movie that people in my theater cheered for at least 3 times. IMDB loves you. Rotten Tomatoes loves you. You made a movie that this country is going to love because your heroine is 11 and says words like cunt and douche and fuck - and they'll think it's edgy and fresh and awesome. And then they'll go home and jerk off to Kim Kardashian and buy the latest Ke$ha single and I'll be on a flight to Thailand, waving goodbye.
