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Ismailov's Replies
I can't really see how a more serious performance by Kline would have improved the film without a whole lot of script rewrites. Like how was he supposed to handle the "touch my breast" scene? Or the scene where he starts doing some goofy "kung fu" poses only to use his foot to hit a button that knocks Jim West onto a pool table that turns upside down leaving West hanging beneath the train?
This isn't to say his actual performance was glorious or anything, but he had so little to work with.
It can be mildly entertaining if you just want to turn your brain off for an hour and a half, but I wouldn't call it a good movie. For one thing, Mikey apparently has the ability to teleport at will; there's multiple instances where he manages to vanish without a sound despite the context making no sense. Another dumb bit is an adult dying via a slingshot marble hitting their eye, which in a comedy would be fine but this is marketed as a horror and thriller.
Yep. I've seen "Experience of Love" described as an odd song for the end credits, but in hindsight it evokes a "this is a 90s film, this is nostalgic" feeling IMO.
As another comment said, it's not intended to be a reboot. It's intended to show James Bond can adapt to the world of the 1990s. Those behind the series had to deal with the end of the Cold War, the disappointing reception of License to Kill, and betting that audiences would like Brosnan as Bond.
I wonder if he was ever offered non-action parts. He obviously isn't an incredible actor, but his career could have benefited in the late 90s and 2000s if he could get supporting roles in comedies or crime dramas or something instead of insisting on being the untouchable badass star in everything.
The thing is that a widespread robot malfunction means humans in the park were overwhelmed and the protagonist had no one to turn to for help.
It isn't impossible to make an entertaining movie where the Gunslinger is the only malfunctioning robot, e.g. the protagonist could try to enlist the help of other humans and "good" robots to try to stop him. But the tone of such a movie would be a lot less bleak and probably not something Crichton would be interested in.
To be fair the touted "realism" of the park seems to play upon the guests' pop culture notions of how life must have been like back in the day. A knight fighting for the love of a queen by doing battle within castle walls against a diabolical "black knight" is more akin to a Walter Scott novel than actual medieval societies.
Romanworld is described as "a lusty treat for the senses in the setting of delightful, decadent Pompeii." Clearly the emphasis is less on an accurate rendition of Roman life and more on an idealized, eroticized portrayal of a very small segment of the Roman population.
I also notice that the park seems to discourage frequent interactions between guests (the protagonist and James Brolin's character, entering the park as friends, are exceptions that prove the rule.) Delos seems to have things planned so that guests experience their fantasies without being interrupted by other guests trying to experience their own fantasies.
So with all that said, it would make perfect sense for a woman guest to be able to fulfill a fantasy of acting as a gunslinger if that is what the guest wanted (and, as the movie notes, these guests pay good money to attend the park.)
Moviegoers are already expecting that a robot called "The Gunslinger" is going to end up turning on humans. Having him just kill the protagonist and the film ends would probably be hard to pull off in a satisfying manner, at least in the hands of Michael Crichton who clearly preferred scenarios where *everything* goes to hell, not just one freak accident that claims a single victim.
One problem with the notion that one can "quickly fix and reuse" robots is that these are presumably being shot and subjected to physical attacks (including bladed instruments) every day or so.
I find it quite unlikely that the costs of repairs wouldn't quickly add up, given the expensive machinery (presumably not mass-produced) that must be required to make the robots behave in so life-like a fashion.
There's no way actors are going to be more expensive than having to pay top of the line engineers and other staff with incredibly specialized skills. Of course, having a gun just go "bang" with no bullet and an actor pretend to fall over dead isn't as "cool" as shooting a real bullet through a human-like robot that rbleeds and ceases all signs of life, but it's certainly going to be more practical as a business.
If it were a "so bad it's good" movie that might have led to a cult following, but instead it's a mediocre big-budget Hollywood production where the script pretty much copy and pastes Will Smith's character from Men in Black into the 19th century and expects laughs based on that premise.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason is the plot. LW2 came out at a time when South Africa was heavily featured in international news, including plenty of protests. The villains are not only shown as bad because of their criminal acts on US soil, but because they are representatives of Apartheid, a system that ended a few years after this film came out.
Compare that to, say, Die Hard 2. An overthrown dictator from a fictional Latin American country is being extradited to the US. Audiences in 1990 could easily tell the dictator is meant to evoke Manuel Noriega, but otherwise the film focuses on mercenaries carrying out shenanigans at an airport to prevent the extradition. You could know nothing about Noriega and be none the wiser watching the film.
LW2's plot comes across as much more "of its time" than DH2.
I think most environmentalists would be wary of a film where the hero saves the Alaskan wilderness by blowing up an oil rig, which realistically would have had pretty bad consequences.
Fire Down Below would make a bit more sense for environmentalists to highlight. It lacks most of the goofy entertainment value of On Deadly Ground IMO but it's the closest thing Seagal had to a "normal" movie.
But at the end of the day neither film goes much into environmental problems, they're just the backdrop for why the villain is bad and Seagal must defeat him. Plus Seagal's reputation as an action hero star has been firmly lodged in the toilet for about 20 years at this point, and his politics (at least nowadays) are conservative, in contradiction to the bulk of environmentalists.
Yeah but if an actor finds a movie's premise objectionable enough to turn down involvement, they probably don't care about what role they're offered in it even if the role meshed with their real-life beliefs.
An actor isn't obliged to be in a movie whose message or content they disagree with though. Case in point, I remember watching Gene Wilder interviewed circa 2008 and he was asked why he wasn't in modern films, and one of his reasons is because he felt there was too much profanity.
I'm sure there's more than a few instances of actors not wanting to lend themselves to films that clash with their personal convictions.
The very fact Blake was alive vindicates Styles, since every "crazy" thing Styles was claiming hinged on Blake still living rather than having supposedly died after escaping from prison (plus Styles' friend retrieved the obsessive clippings Blake made of Styles while in prison.)
The hooker gave him gonorrhea, which isn't nice but can be conquered by antibiotics.
I agree with you except for the claim that Seagal "comes across as very serious and dour" in his films. I can't comment on his more modern output, but every character he played from 1988 to 1997 (with the exception of his brief role in Executive Decision) had one-liners and moments of levity.
Siskel and Ebert actually liked it better than the first. Otherwise most critics seemed to regard it as a decent action film, not as good as the first but still entertaining.
To be fair the 80s also had Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Prince, Tina Turner, Philip Michael Thomas, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Mr. T among others.
Admittedly, Cosby's stature was higher than all the names I mentioned, but having the number of black American icons in that decade limited to just three guys is a bit excessive.
The timing doesn't really make sense. Andrea Constand accused Cosby in January 2004 (and wasn't the first to do so.) Cosby's controversial "Pound Cake" speech was delivered months later. Hannibal Buress' stand-up routine calling Cosby a rapist took place a decade later.
Cosby's speech did get a lot of attention at the time he delivered it, but by the time of Buress' routine it seemed pretty much forgotten, and I don't think it's unfair to say Cosby's influence on pop culture was less relevant in 2014 compared to 2004.
Also he was by no means the first person to complain about problems among black people. Louis Farrakhan and Calvin O. Butts among others were making similar speeches many years before Cosby and would have made more obvious targets for a discrediting campaign than an aging comedian.
He intended to go on tour last year, but that obviously didn't come to pass.
It's possible ill health is the reason, but I also wouldn't be surprised if he thought his reputation was going to significantly improve after leaving prison and he's instead finding it difficult to get such a tour off the ground.
O.J. Simpson apparently had a similar disillusionment after his trial ended. He thought his life was going to go on like before: starring in commercials, being an honored guest at public events, etc.