Shocked and amazed..

I just saw this movie for the first time today. It was AMAZINGLY bad. I mean, seriously, this is one of the worst-directed and badly-written movies I've ever seen.

The acting was descent, the sets were interesting, and the CGI was OK for 1997.

And that's it.

Where to start? How about the dialog? I would have to go back and watch it again - which I NEVER want to do - but I'm pretty sure over half the lines in the movie were exposition. Several times, it was exposition of things that have JUST HAPPENED. And sometimes, exposition about things that we've already had expository scenes *about*. It's as though the director thought the "plot" was so complex, the characters so deep, that we'd need to have it all explained to us. Over and over and over.

And the dialog, even when not being on-the-nose explanation of what we were seeing at that moment or minutes before, was incredibly clumsy.

Then, there were the awful flashbacks. Now, a flashback can done well, I suppose, but it works best as an aside to show us something that was hidden the first time around, or to structure the story in such a way as to dole out the mystery a little bit at a time (ala "Kill Bill"). But not here - I've honestly got no idea why some of the many, many flashbacks existed in this movie. We have brief scenes that tell us nothing we didn't already know, and even a flashback to a scene we'd just seen earlier in the movie.

The characters were, if anything LESS well fleshed-out that their comic-book counterparts. Considering Todd McFarlane's less-than-stellar writing skills, I found this to be awe-inspiringly inept.

The fight scenes were dull and badly-coreographed. Why use a great martial-artist like White when you're going to have him mostly shoot things? And the fights had absolutely no sense of dramatic tension, a back and forth, a "build". They just began, and ended, with some punching/shooting/throwing in-between.

Speaking of "why use White anyhow" - you go to the trouble to get an amazing physical specimen as your lead and then you design a suit that makes him look fat. Why?

I could go on, but this is already too long - sorry! Bottom line: bad directing and banal writing added up to a waste of two great actors (Sheen and Williamson), two good ones (Leguizamo and White) and a whole lot of special effects talent.