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Well, the critics finally got one right. This isn’t a bad movie, but it could have been so much more. The first sign of trouble is that the opening 5 or 6 minutes is a voice-over of the lead-in to the story. That rarely bodes well. Sure, this is a PG Disney flick, but the average teenager grew up on TV and can assimilate a back-story pretty well through even the crudest of flashbacks.

OK, so the story is that Cage is one of Merlin’s original apprentices and there’s a wicked witch sorceress who wants to destroy the world with an army of the undead and it’s been going on for 1000′s of years and all that time Cage has been looking for the person who could wear Merlin’s ring and take up the quest. The present-day “hero” is a physics nerd at NYU who’s into Tesla Coils … and he’s still in love with the girl he knew ten years ago in grade school. Yeah. Sounds familiar.

What’s good about this picture? Well, the explanation of sorcery is actually pretty spot-on based on current theories of metaphysics and quantum mechanics. So the foundation is kind of there. The…

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The good news is that this is the best “Predator” movie since the original … though still not quite as good as the first. It’s well made and well cast, there’s plenty of action, and it’s not a gawdawful special effects orgy.

The bad news is that, despite the production values and strong cast it’s still … well … kind of boring.

The story is that a bunch of mercenaries, soldiers, convicts, and more or less the worst people on earth get scooped up by the Predators and parachuted onto their game preserve on some planet. There they figure out that they are the “game” and are being hunted, from which point it’s the classic hunter vs. hunted kind of deal.

Adrien Brody is pretty good as the de-facto leader of the earthlings. He’s got that detached violence kind of aura down pretty well so he works in the role. But he’s almost too dry … it’s tough to give a damn about if his character lives or dies. Especially since we all know he’ll make it since he’s the lead actor.

Laurence Fishburne appears about half way through as a survivor of ten seasons of the…

Since it’s kind of a slow time for football fans, here’s some stuff from the archives I’ve pulled out.

The first is a parody of Colts’ GM Bill Polian and his amazing knack for getting the league to change the rules to benefit his team. See if you can spot the Minuteman on the cliff, getting ready to snipe him.

The second is a shot at Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo who, after botching the hold on a field goal a few years ago, still was sent to the Pro Bowl a few weeks later. Amazing.

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Rating:

The reviews on this movie were spot on. Boring, uninteresting, and not even Megan Fox’s hotness nor John Malkovich could save it.

The story is reminiscent of the Clint Eastwood film “The Outlaw Josey Wales” … actually, you can see influences from a lot of the Eastwood/Sergio Leone westerns in this film. And there’s a bit of the old “Wild, Wild West” TV series thrown in too. It’s about a guy in the Civil War who’s a great soldier who crosses the wrong people and gets his family killed in the process and then goes into bounty hunting and revenge seeking.

The elements for a good movie were here. A decent story based on a graphic novel. Malkovich as the main bad guy. Megan Fox. And a license to shoot people in a variety of creative ways. The problem is that it just does not work. Josh Brolin doesn’t carry off the role. He’s neither funny nor charismatic. Eastwood’s characters were stoic as well, but there was always that wry smile he’d show at the right time. Malkovich was either overly constrained by the script or director, or bored … but he’s just delivering lines up there. Megan Fox…