TOTAL RECALL (2012)

A hundred years from now war has left all but Australia and parts of Europe uninhabitable.  For whatever reason the people in Australia travel each day through the Earth and work at factories in Europe.  I'm not really sure why.  Anyway, factory worker Colin Farrell is unhappy with his life (even though he has an attractive wife), so he goes to a artificial memory implanter to get some spy memories installed and low and behold: he's already a spy!  Right then the fuzz bust in and start killing everybody.  Farrell escapes, but now he's on the run and even worse, his hot wife is also out to kill him.  Ends up Farrell is in the middle of a epic battle between Europe and the "terrorists" of Australia who don't like the way the Europeans are treating them.

Sounds convoluted (and it is), but I don't really care cause all I want to see a fun sci-fi action movie.  Any semblance to a well-told story is just a bonus.  Fortunately there are a few cool action scenes (the elevator chase, "the Fall" sequence), but unfortunately the filmmakers unwisely chose to pollute their own film with almost nonstop lens flares.  It was nuts.  Imagine watching a normal movie with some asshole constantly shining a flashlight in your face and that's what this movie was like.  I've never seen anything like it before and I hope I never see anything like it ever again.  Also, I wasn't impressed with Bryan Cranston as the bad guy.  He's a great actor, but he didn't come off as evil enough and that fight scene between him and Farrell was sad.

Not a bad story and some of the action scenes were fun, but the lens flares nearly ruin the film.  Worth a single watch only.  Oh yeah, the three-titted character from the original is back.

Original - Total Recall (1990)

JOHN CARTER (2012)

Civil War-era soldier John Carter finds himself on the run from some Indians.  He's holed up in a cave when suddenly a funny looking dude appears and tries to kill Carter with a knife.  Carter beats the crap out of the guy and accidentally transports himself to Mars with the odd amulet the man was holding.  Once on Mars, John finds that because of the difference in gravity on Mars he's now superstrong and can jump super fucking high.  Added to this, John gets himself involved with an ongoing conflict between the three biggest groups on Mars...mainly due to the fact that the daughter of the blue group is hot as fuck!

As far as entertainment goes, JOHN CARTER is a good watch, but despite all of the bizarre creatures and action-packed sequences I still just felt kinda "blah" about the whole thing.  The biggest things that could have turned this into something more promising would have been: 1) different director.  I love FINDING NEMO and WALL-E is one of the greatest films of all time, but Stanton was just not the man for this job. 2) don't make Carter so depressing. 3) make Carter less indestructible. 4) make the Tharks less cartoonish and more threatening. 5) streamline the script.  There was way too much stuff going on.

Not a great film or a bad film, just merely a mediocre one.  That said, the ending was the best part and I probably would watch a sequel just to find out what happened.