More bad movie reviews

Continuing my public service of watching bad films so you don't have to, today I bring you reviews of two of the worst films I have ever watched all the way through, and a film so scary it has persuaded me never to set foot in any building with more than one room, and never to go outdoors, either.

The Marine: Somehow, The Rock has gone from being a wrestler to being a movie star. True, he's not the greatest actor, but he's managed to be in some good roles in some good films, and actually managed to be the best thing about "Be Cool". So, it stands to reason that other wrestlers could do the same, right? And so, we get Kane appearing in "See No Evil", Stone Cold Steve Austin in "The Condemned", and me realising I know far too much about wrestling, or movies, or both.

We also get John Cena starring in The Marine, quite possibly the worst action film of all time. Robert "Terminator 2" Patrick is the villain. The plot is quite simple: the bad guys steal some diamonds and go on the run, along the way they take the hero's wife hostage, and the hero goes on a rampage getting her back. We've seen it a hundred times before, which is the major problem of the film.

The secondary problem is that the lead actor just can't, which means they've had to reduce his dialogue to about 20 lines, and replace it with big explosions. This works for Michael Bay, but no-one else has the name recognition to pull it off. It creates the problem that our hero is basically just a slab of meat, and not particularly likeable. Think Dolph Lundgren in "Masters of the Universe", but without the career-defining performance.

Then there's the villain, who is the most idiotic cliche possible. Hmm, two of my minions are bickering. One of them is loyal and reliable, the other is entirely responsible for the mess we're currently in. Which one should I kill? Hmm, we're being chased by an absurdly superhuman marine, who only wants to get his wife back. Shall we release her, and get this guy off our backs, or shall we continue to waste time and effort keeping her with us?

Oh, and a note to the film-makers: the reason the first Die Hard works is that John McClaine isn't a superhuman killing machine. He's an ordinary guy in a messed up situation. He only becomes superhuman in the sequels, where the audience is willing to accept this nonsense because the first one laid the groundwork. So, if you're not doing a Die Hard sequel, your hero is probably best served not being superhuman. Unless he's a superhero, of course.

And don't let your lead actor rap over the closing credits, unless he's Eminem or the like. That's just adding insult to injury.

Smoking Aces: When I saw the adverts for this, before it hit the cinema, I thought "that looks quite good." How wrong I was.

This film revolves around a Las Vegas entertainer nicknamed Aces, and a big bounty on his head. Consequently, we have huge numbers of hired killers running around trying to kill him. Unfortunately, the film-makers forgot to introduce most of them as characters, and managed to have the rest of them act in totally inconsistent manners by the end of the film.

The plot of the film is also packed with double- and triple-crosses, all laid out because that's what the film-makers felt they needed, rather than because they made sense. The inevitable final double-cross then neatly undoes the whole point of the rest of the film, and is founded on a twist that was obvious almost from the beginning.

Still, at least there weren't any wrestlers in this one.

Them: This film was inspired by a true story, which makes it all the more worrying. It's a French film set in Bucharest, following the experiences of one Clementine, a French teacher living in Romania. Mostly, though, it's a film about an improbably-hot woman in tight jeans being menaced by hoodies (proving that this story could never happen in the UK - the government would just give the kids ASBOs, and that would be the end of that, I'm sure). There's also a boyfriend, but he's rather irrelevant to proceedings.

What made this film so scary, though, was that the killers in question weren't superhuman. At various times, the heroine wounded or even killed them. Additionally, the film makers did an excellent job of building scenes, and the tension flowed from that. Well, that, and the fact that the killers weren't motivated by revenge, or lust, or some childhood trauma, or any of the normal Hollywood cop-outs. Oh, no. They were terrorising the teacher because they were bored, and wanted something to do of a Saturday night.