CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)

In the year 2027, the world has been stricken with two horrible afflictions.  In the first, all women have become infertile.  Without a baby being born in 18 years humans have lost all hope and everything has turned into chaos.  The second even more disastrous problem is cameras can no longer stand still.  They have to move all the time.  Even when it's not an action shot and it's just two people standing still talking about something serious, the camera is compelled to jiggle around all over the joint.  It's distracting, heartbreaking and sad, sad, sad.

For some reason the people in this movie don't even seem concerned about the punch drunk cameras.  Instead they selfishly spend all of their time trying to get a recently discovered pregnant woman to safety.  That's a lot harder than it sounds because Britain (where the film is located) is now the only functioning government left in the world, but just barely.  For the most part the entire country has turned into a George Orwell police state nightmare.  Former activist Clive Owen is recruited against his will by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore) into helping a young girl get to the "Human Project", another activist group that is rumored to have scientists specializing in infertility.  Stuff happens and next thing Owen knows he's in the thick of it with people from all sides trying to kill him.

I enjoyed CHILDREN OF MEN.  The story is interesting, the pace is good and some of the action sequences were impressively filmed.  But that goddamn camera was too much for me.  Purposely raw documentary style camerawork is okay for short periods of time.  When Takashi Miike used it briefly in 2003's YAKUZA DEMON with the rain splattering on the camera lens is was awesome (also his budget was probably 1/60th of what they used here), but in CHILDREN OF MEN the entire movie is filmed that way and it gets old quick.  I'm sure some people enjoy it and praise how it transports the viewer into the disorder of the the film, but to me it was just distracting.   After awhile I found myself paying more attention to the corners of the screen than the action on the screen.

Worth a watch, but I wish the story had been introduced a little better at the beginning, the overall story darker and the camerawork steadier.  Seeing Michael Caine playing air guitar to a bastardized version of Aphex Twin's "Omgyjya Switch 7" was pretty funny though.

BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1979)

Seven years after the original THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, somebody thought it would be a good idea to make a sequel.  Somebody was wrong. 

Starting out right where the original film ends, BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE features boat dude Michael Caine and his crew (Karl Malden and Sally Field) showing up right as the helicopter from the first film is leaves.  They decide to go in through the hole and steal whatever they can.  How honorable.  At the same time, Telly Savalas shows up posing as a doctor and he and his men also go in to steal some stuff also.  The two groups of thieves have different shopping lists though, Caine just wants gold, jewelry and money whereas Telly wants...wait for it...plutonium.  That's right there's a secret shipment of plutonium onboard the Poseidon.  Somebody actually gets paid real money to write this stuff? 

So the question is: does the "adventure" portion of BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE outweigh the ridiculous story?  Hell no.  The action scenes are unoriginal, the acting is horrible, the sets look just like sets, the dialogue (especially Sally Field's) is painfully bad and once all of the characters are introduced, you can easily guess who's gonna live and who's gonna die. 

Worth watching only for a continuation of the original story, but even that's stretching it.  Skip it or watch it for a laugh.

Part 1 - The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Remake 1 - The Poseidon Adventure (2005)
Remake 2 - Poseidon (2006)

JAWS: THE REVENGE (1987)

The movie that killed the series (so far).  Is JAWS: THE REVENGE as bad as you've heard? Probably. It's pretty goddamn shitty.

The film opens with Sheriff Brody's youngest son getting eaten by a gigantic Great White shark in the waters off Amity Island. Soon afterwards, Ellen Brody says fuck this place and moves to The Bahamas to be with her eldest son Michael who is now a marine biologist. During all of this, Ellen has a strange sense of apprehension that the shark (who exactly is this particular shark by anyway?!) is going to follow her all the way to The Bahamas and eat her and her family.  What the hell?  On top of that, throughout the film she has some kind of psychic link to the shark.  Wow! Somebody got paid to write this? Anyway, it ends up that she's correct and the shark soon shows up and starts terrorizing her family.  He even knocks down an airplane!

Stretch that paper thin story into 89 minutes and you have the recipe for a truly bad movie. And how Michael Caine, just one year after his superb performance in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS got involved with this stinker would be a story better than the movie itself. He is quoted on Wikipedia as saying "I have never seen it [the film], but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific!", so I guess that explains that.

Should you watch JAWS 4? That really depends on how bored you are and how fine-tuned your sense of humor is, because this is not a good movie at all...but it is hilarious. I say go for it! But don't say I didn't warn you.

According to what I've read about the JAWS: THE REVENGE novelization tie-in the reason the shark was so intent on killing members of the Brody clan is because it was under the control of a witch doctor who was pissed at the Brody's. Makes sense.

Part 1 - Jaws (1975)
Part 2 - Jaws 2 (1978)
Part 3 - Jaws 3 (1983)

That background looks fake as fook.