Word: palmas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mighty have fallen. Brian De Palma, who hit a directorial high watermark with _The Untouchables_ also has a nasty and annoying habit of making really bad movies. Painfully...
...last two efforts have suffered from a lack of structure (_Snake Eyes_) or moments of utter incomprehensibility (_Mission: Impossible_), and the trend isn't stopping anytime soon. Not if his latest effort, _Mission to Mars_, is any indication. What De Palma improves on his previous problems is negated for rampant use of overdone sci-fi conventions...
...hard to fault the cast given that they've been given such empty and stale material, but each member really doesn't seem to want to be there. Tim Robbins must be appearing either because of blackmail, contractual obligations to Disney or a personal favour to Brian De Palma because he phones in most of his performance (probably when he realized how bad the whole project was going to be). Don Cheadle, who has previously been a solid bit player, lacks charisma here and Jerry O'Connell has the dubious distinction of being upstaged by the HAL like computer appearing...
...what is essentially a vapid and uninspired work of traditional box office tripe is Brian De Palma. Throughout his entire career, he has been a director with a distinct emphasis on visual style over substantiative content, and the truth remains with _M2M_. Even as the mother of all sandstorms rips space travellers apart and astronauts soar weightless through their ship before our very eyes, there's little done in these moments to further the story's cause. There is also the sense that we've seen this all before, and we have. It was called _2001: A Space Odyssey_ from...
...only explanation possibly for a movie that is so disappointingly and resoundingly bad this reviewer had great expectations for De Palma to resurrect himself is victimization of bad timing. Atrocious lines, leaden acting and rampant predictability are what we have come to expect from summer movies, but it seems as though final editing wasn't ready in time to capitalize on the time of year when people (and their brains) seem to go south, so some genius decided to release it during March. With all the Oscar hype infecting the air at this moment, hopefully _Mission to Mars_ will...