Hey Kickheads,

I write to you as I complete the colors on what will be a stupendous new DropKick page, continuing right where we left off last week.  But, as that is great news, there is however very terrible news that I regret to inform you.  One of the heroes of 80’s action movies, a genre we here at DropKick love to points of extreme insanity, has died.

Patrick Swayze lost his two-year battle with cancer today.

This news bares a slight significant toll on Andy and myself because, see, it took us FOREVER to figure out what we wanted DropKick to look like under his mask.  What Chazz Phelps looked like was a very difficult decision.  And, for whatever reason, something divine pointed me to a certain movie and a certain look and a certain actor.

I'm breaking a copyright to post this. Hopefully no lawyers care too much. It's out of the deepest of respects.

Yep.  That’s right.  Chazz’s look  was inspired by Patrick Swayze from Road House (Chazz has a broken nose, however).  See, Road House is one of Chazz’s favorite movies and Patrick Swayze is one of his favorite actors, so of course he’s going to try to go for the same awesome hairdo that the great Swayze wears.  To see him die at such a young age is disheartening and tragic, and let me tell you, that if Chazz payed attention to the news (he doesn’t), he would be crying silently to himself as all action movie fans are right now.

So, please join me today in mourning the passing of a legend of action and not-action film.  Patrick Swayze was always a cool dude with a classy style who gave us one of the best action movies ever.  I’m talking about Point Break here.  Road House is something else entirely.

To Swayze.  You were the man.

- Sam

Hey-hey-

I’m starting a new column here on DropKick.  To give us some more content for people to come back to, we’ve created a segment called the Action Addict- blog entries covering our love of action movies.  It’s no subtle thing, our love for action movies.  DropKick is all about it.  That love oozes through every pore of DropKick’s retarded face.

So, for the first Action Addict, I’m going to go over what is probably my all-time greatest guilty pleasure: the quite horrible 1995 film Judge Dredd.

Judge Dredd is seriously a piece of shit movie.  It fails on almost every level.  The action is lame.  The acting is pretty terrible.  The writing is atrocious.  Rob Schneider is in it.  You really can’t do much worse.

How did this happen?  Sly Stallone, despite how he may seem, is not an idiot.  Of the big 80’s action hero actors, he’s actually one of the more intellectual of the bunch.  Okay, maybe that’s not saying much, but he was on board Judge Dredd from the get-go, recognizing the comic book for being the brutal, satirical, brilliant thing that it is.  Not many people I know have read the Dredd comics, despite the fact that the character is perhaps the most popular comic book character in the United Kingdom where he came from.

At the very least, the movie should have been a rip-roaring and violent good time.  But… sadly, it’s not.  What happened here?

My dissection of what went wrong with Judge Dredd begins has mostly the do with when it came out.  The mid-90’s were the worst period outside of the 1950’s for action movies.  The movie industry at the time did not see the need in making big-budget, ultra-violent rated-R movies when they could make family-safe PG-13 movies instead and make twice the amount of money (never mind that most of the most profitable action movies of all time have been rated-R).  There is a logic there.  PG-13 means kids can get into it, no problem, and the 90’s were a period of people cracking down on kids sneaking into rated-R movies.  You wanted the money of those kids, you could not swing an R-rating.  Fair enough…

Except, Judge Dredd… that property… it’s goddamn violent.  It’s not violent for the sake of it, either.  It’s actually satirical and has a point.  Judge Dredd is “actually” rated R, but to quote IMDB:

From the beginning the film was intended to receive a PG-13 rating. Due to excessive violence the MPAA refused to downgrade the initial R rating despite repeated appeals by the studio and Stallone. Mostly because of schedule constraints the film could not be re-cut and was released with an R rating.

So, long story short, it’s half-assed.  It’s got an R-rating, but not because it really deserves it.

For the unfamiliar, the story of Judge Dredd takes place in the future after decades of nuclear war.  Only a few cities remain standing amidst the “cursed Earth”, an endless desert filled with mutants.  In those cities, law and order is maintained by the Judges, a group of police officers with the power to not only arrest criminals, but to try them, judge them, and (if need-be) execute them on the spot.  Judge Dredd is Mega-City 1’s most famous and most capable Judge.  He was genetically engendered to be the perfect killing machine and to be totally morally incorruptibly.

The violence in the comic speaks to the nature of the world’s brutality.  The Judges exist because humanity has gone too far.  Things have gotten so bad, we have allowed this system to be created.  It’s a statement to own judicial system, our over-crowded prisons, and the power with-which we allow our police system to function.

You take that violence away, take away the brutality, and I’m not buying the society that would create the judges.  In the movie, you never get much of a sense for Mega-City 1.  It actually looks pretty clean, pretty civil, and pretty not-bad.  There’s one bad area seen in the opening, but that’s about it.  It’s just kind of there, trying its damndest to look like Blade Runner, but not ever-once feeling like the real, lived-in city that Los Angeles feels like in Ridley Scott’s masterpiece (itself a classic action movie, in my opinion).

Another big, big problem with Judge Dredd is the humor.  The humor in the comic book comes from a very tongue-in-cheek sense of satire.  I won’t lie about it: the comic can be damn goofy sometimes.  It depends on what story-line you’re reading (the Judge Dredd comic book is over thirty years old and on-going… it’s got a lot of weird stuff in there, collected over the years), but the general tone of the comic is kind of… funny.  It takes the world totally serious, but the world is… kind of odd.  Not like, weird-odd.  There’s jokes everywhere, layers and layers of them.

But the film doesn’t get away with playing things close-to-the-hip.  The film is trying REALLY hard to be an adventure story.  Adventure stories can balance comedy and drama on the edge of a knife.  Look at Robin Hood, at how that story is at both times charming and care-free then down-right intensely dramatic.  The Judge Dredd film wants that SOOOO bad (it even has a pretty amazing score that feels like it’s right at home for an adventure film… just not the film that it is).

The comedy plays as sophmoric and childish, the kind of thing you’d see in a kid’s film.  The jokes never feel like they come from a real place, more like the filmmakers reached a point where “Damn, we need a joke here…” and just filled it in.  Then, after some lame joke, they try to follow that with a scene with some kind of false-pathos of dramatic tension.  They want their hero, Stallone’s Dredd, to be likeable, to be a human being, to be a Shakespearean tragic character.

The comic Dredd isn’t tragic.  He might have moments of tragedy, but generally… he just kicks ass.  He’s a pretty empty character… because he was genetically designed to be so.  Stallone and company are trying to pump him full of false-emotion (that Stallone isn’t really capable of reaching, at least under director Danny Cannon’s command… more on that in a minute).

You’d think that having a no-nonsense, ass-kicking main character would be easy to translate into an action film.  He’d be right at home in the r-rated-loving, brutal-as-hell 1980’s.  But being birthed into film in the 90’s is totally what killed it.

I know I could point more fingers here.  The script is bad.  It’s not terrible.  Just bad.  It actually gets a surprising amount of things right from the comic.  All the Judge Dredd-stuff is there: his talking gun, his motorcycle (except it flies now, for no reason), his outfit, his brother Rico as the main villain, the cloning storyline, even the mutants in the wasteland (who really aren’t mutants in the movie… they’re just weird guys living out in the desert who have crawled out of a bad western).

The comic has its own language of curse words (so it could be more widely published in Britain).  The movie carries through with that, using the word “DRAK” profusely.  It’s one thing to read that, but to hear it, man, it really grates on you.

That’s actually a theme within the movie.  The movie does try to do things like the comic, but it ends up failing.  The cursed Earth in the comic is supposed to be like the old west.  But in the movie, it just comes across as weird and half-assed. The lame one-liners and goofy humor is in the comic, but it just doesn’t work in the movie.

I won’t totally defend the comic, either.  Judge Dredd has its good moments and its bad, but like any comic as old and long as it is, it’s got a lot of fat that should have been cut, and there’s a plenty of crap you have to wade through to find anything truly inspiring.  But the general idea of Judge Dredd is so cool, so inventive, and so damn simple, that making a movie out of it should have been a snap.  A Judge Dredd movie would never, not in a million years be anything great.  It would never be a work of art.  There are way better comics with way more consistency to look for in that area (it’s possible to make a Preacher movie that would win Oscars… won’t ever happen, but it’s possible).

But Judge Dredd could have been a decent-to-good action movie.  Just simple action with the satire being subtle in the background would have been fine.  Instead, it’s a lame comic-book movie (that, bizarrely, opens with issues of the Judge Dredd comic flashing over the opening credits), hampered by a weak script and terrible direction.  I honestly think that about 85% of the problems with this film really come from the direction.  Just the tone of it, the forced nature of the dramatic elements, and the execution of the action scenes (most of which move with the grace of a freight train) slow the movie down to a crawl.

Then there’s Rob Schneider’s comic-relief-just-for-the-hell-of-it character, and the less that’s said about that the better.

I still enjoy the movie, but I enjoy it on the same level I enjoy watching the weird homeless guys I see on the subway.  It’s slightly deranged, more than likely mentally retarded, shabby-looking, but it’s got a sense of self that’s kind of hard for me to totally dismiss.  It’s got the damn nerve to go and piss on the subway door singing tunes from “Annie” and, damnit, I just can’t hate too much on that.  It makes me kind of laugh.  Even though it’s disgusting.

And it’s got a giant robot in it.

I think my analogy is broken.

Hey all, Sam here. We had a running joke last week at work (and by work I mean the place where I work what pays me money so I can afford rent) and this running joke resulted in me making this. It’s gleefully retarded.

A lot of people hate Michael Bay.   He’s built a reputation of being a loud, screaming jackass, totally defining the stereotype of the obnoxious, rich, powerful, disrespectful Hollywood insider, and all this built from really terrible action movies.  I mean, really terrible.

The Island puts me to sleep.  It’s a total bore.  It’s an action movie… that’s boring.  That’s sinful.

Watching Pearl Harbor is like pulling teeth.  All of them.  At once.  On fire.

Bad Boys (the first one) is totally forgettable.  I seriously remember nothing about it.

The less said about the Transformers movie, the better (especially the second one, a movie so weirdly awful I’m almost positive that it’s Bay’s attempt at some kind of abstract art film).

Armageddon is a clothes-hanger abortion of a movie.

Now, I won’t go out and try to totally condemn Michael Bay as a person.  I honestly have never met him.  The rumors of his on-set assholeness may and most likely are blown out of proportion (people in the movie industry can get bizarrely delicate and act like babies… so it wouldn’t surprise me if those rumors are coming from people who freak out at the slightest bit of direct assertiveness, which Michael Bay is more than capable of).  So I will judge the man as an artist, and I will judge him by his art.  And for the most part, the man’s art blows.

His action scenes are border-line incomprehensible.  Understanding the geography of his placement, of where characters are in relation to each other during combat, can be totally maddening.  His love for sweeping camera moves, quickly and jarringly inter-cut at speeds that break the sound barrier, combined with action scenes that have no logic to them in the first place totally drives me nuts.  This guy is presently known as the KING of action movies.  But his action… well, it’s bad.  Transformers 2 is proof of that.  And like I said, the less I talk about that movie, the better I’ll feel.

The only movies I can look at from Bay’s resume with any kind of affection are The Rock and Bad Boys II.  The Rock is… well, it’s a bad movie.  A few things save it from complete asshole-town, though.  For one thing, it’s got legitimate chemistry between the leads, which is important for a buddy-action film.  Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery totally sell the movie, even in scenes that make zilch sense (the scene where they break into the Rock via a video game-like puzzle in a fire-incinerator boggles my mind to this day).  It’s got a good villain in Ed Harris, who at least makes your forget for minutes at a time that his villainous plot to take over Alcatraz and threaten San Fransisco with total destruction is completely illogical.  Overall, The Rock is solid (heh) but not special.

Bad Boys II is special like the special olympics.  Bad Boys II is special like watching a monkey fuck a football.  Bad Boys II is special like a case of mad cow disease on a lemur farm.  Bad Boys II may be the greatest achievement in cinematic history.

That last statement is total overblown hyperbole, and rightly so.  Bad Boys II is total overblown hyperbole madness condensed into a visual art (the word “art” being used in its loosest sense).

Let me explain myself a bit.  I remember when Bad Boys II came out and I couldn’t have cared less.  Like I said before, the first movie is aimlessly forgettable.  But my friends were going to see it at the time and I was home from college, so I tagged along.

Leaving the theater, my brain ceased to function.  I had no idea what I had just seen and it wouldn’t be until several more viewings on DVD that I could put it into words (and even now, that’s hard).

That movie only cares about making your balls hurt.

The plot meanders and just runs around like an infant who just figured out how to stand.  It takes detours into weird comedic scenes, one of which features Will Smith and Martin Lawrence fighting rodents in a drug dealer’s attic.  Another features Martin Lawrence taking ecstasy and feeling up his boss.  Another features a scene where they hide in a crematorium with a dead hot girl with a great rack.

In between all this is some of the most insane, dumb-as-shit action scenes I’ve ever seen.  Stuff blows up that shouldn’t blow up.  You remember the game Goldeneye on N64?  You remember how if you shot at office chairs, they would explode?  If that happened in Bad Boys II, you wouldn’t notice, because it’d feel normal.

That’s the kind of movie this is.

Let me get the legitimate criticism out of the way.  The movie works because Will Smith and Martin Lawrence actually play off each other really well.  The movie works because, weirdly enough, there is a strange emphasis on character related moments.  The plot… there is no plot.  It’s pretty much only there as an excuse for action scenes and beats of character.

Two-thirds through the film, and you pretty much get a straight-aced action movie, but it’s not special yet.  Then the movie goes to Cuba.  IT GOES TO CUBA.  IN.  THE.  LAST.  ACT.

There is a phenomenon in action movies I started calling the “action movie 4th act”.  Most movies can be analyzed in terms of three acts.  Act 1- we meet our characters and the world and the general threat or conflict.  Act 2- the characters confront the plot’s conflict and fight it through a series of victories and tragedies.  Act 3- the characters figure out what they’re doing wrong and defeat the conflict.

True Lies was the first movie I saw that tossed in a weird 4th act.  In True Lies, the main conflict of the film is Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis’s marriage.  That fixes it self at the end of the second act.  Then they have to save their daughter from a terrorist.  The movie hasn’t really been building to that.  It just sort of… happens.  They resolve the key issue of the film and then… they have to save a kidnapped family member.

That exact thing happens in Bad Boys II.  They run-off the evil drug dealer, but the evil drug dealer has kidnapped Martin Lawrence’s sister and Will Smith’s love interest.  The drug dealer goes to Cuba.  And Martin Lawrence and Will Smith follow him.  Martin Lawrence and Will Smith who are police officers in Miami.  They go to Cuba.  That’s balls-out nuts.  That alone would and could be the plot for an entire movie.  You could make a whole movie (and still an action movie) out of dealing with just getting a squad of pissed-off police officers into another country.  Hell, half the movie would be them fighting their own government, as this would create a massive international incident for the US government.

Bad Boys II just freaking ignores that.  They get to Cuba like I drive to work.  And when they get there, they have tons of CIA and military help.  Just like that.  And they blow up a mansion while fighting the Cuban military.  Just like that.  And they drive a hummer through a whole village, which blows up (there’s drugs in it… so, you know… drugs are explosive… apparently).  And they drive up to Gitmo and get stuck in a field of landmines and have a Mexican-stand-off.  Just.  Like.  That.

And all this happens in about fifteen, twenty minutes.  At the end of the movie.  All because, as Martin Lawrence says, “Shit just got real.”  There’s your reasoning.  The shit.  Got.  Real.

It’s blissfully illogical and insane.  But the movie makes you believe it.  You’re like, “Yeah… I’m with this.  Go to Cuba, you Miami City police officers.  You give ‘em hell!”

I wont’ defend the movie to people who hate on it.  It’s a terrible movie, to be sure.  But I love it.  I love it for how dumb it is, how little it cares, and how little it cares about you, the viewer.  It knows what it is, what it wants, and it’s going to get that even if you don’t know what the hell is going on.

I love every second of it.