I like Luc Besson flicks. They are almost always well made, well plotted, and great eye candy, especially his sci-fi flicks. Well, Luc is back with another, but the force is not strong in this one.
In 2070 the US builds a space station come super max prison where inmates are held in cryo stasis for the duration of their sentence. But all is not well and there are accusations of illegal and forced medical experimentation on the inmates, as well as supposition that the stasis sends you bonkers. So the POTUS's daughter, who heads up a human rights charity, goes up there to take a looksee. At the same time down on Earth an old school CIA agent gets kippered up and ends up the fall guy in a botched operation. When a cock up results in the prison inmates breaking loose of stasis and kidnapping the prison staff and VIPs the agent is given a choice.....go up and save the day, or be sent there any way and spend 30 years in a deep freeze. Cue explosions.....
Yes its a good action flick and has all the usual quirky Luc Besson touches like mad Scottish bad guys and dry wise cracking humor, but it just doesn't try hard enough with the eye candy....it looks pretty much like 2015 rather than 2070. And its also pretty obvious that the last third got edited down to hell to make it fit the 1hr30m dumbass jock on a kegger with a goldfish attention span format....the end is so squashed up its a real disappointment and obviously has been shredded down by some brain dead test audience. When you need to have the surprise bad guy monologue all the back plot in to tie down the film that says they made you cut out all the storyline bits and film this nonsense Elastoplast scene instead. Its all put together very choppily....seems Luc went off for a gallic 6 hour lunch and left all the editing to a crew of standard Hollydud hack merchants. Its a shame, even though it is still a good flick. Guy Pierce really saves it.
So well worth a download, and scrapes through as a keeper....but only just. Two cheers.
Out and about in lovely crisp DVDRIP formats all over the shop.
In other news it seems Hollydud's feverish feeding of 80s and 90s sci fi into the recycle mashup shredder has now taken in the old Sly Stally flick Judge Dredd. Seen the trailer for the new film DREDD and .... it looks crap. Press on the Spiderman reboot says that is crap as well, and the reboot of Godzilla also looks utter dross. Maybe next year they will get back to actually making something new and original after the finish pissing on films that have already been made.
