Snow joke - six foot rabbits and the run-a-way brain.
Jimmy Stewart was right! There IS a six foot rabbit named Harvey - Harvey Weinstein. And ya know, sometimes he is good for nothing but sucking up the chablis, stupping c-listers, and scaring young children with his face-for-radio. But ya know, there's a reason why seven oscar winners thanked god in the last twenty years and thirty thanked Harv - he's a movie guy. He knows this crap. So, when he says to stick twenty more arms out of the train and make some damn cuts, then make some damn cuts! What do you want to end up with anyway - fly flan or sushi?!
And if we wanted bad Spielberg, Abrams, or Bay we could pretty much just drop the needle on any number of those Blurays. But that's the ***** of it - there's just enough imagination, execution, and artistry here to move the fanboy phallus angle up past forty-five degrees. The production design and special effects are just crackerjack.
And Let's rundown the rundown characters:
Chris Evans doesn't seem have the gravitas to pull off anything that doesn't involve multi-colored underwear. He's like John Voight-lite from (ironically) 'Runaway Train' (although to be fair, he IS let down by the comic book-ish script and Joon-ho).
Tilda Swinton has one great speech and then kinda devolves into an repetitive Olive-Oil-from-hell.
Is there some kind of law where John Hurt HAS to play the world weary, damaged goods, ninty year old sage? (He's been phoning that one in since 'Midnight Express').
Ed Harris, Octavia Spencer, and Jamie Bell suffer from these diseases respectively:
- sinister, cynical meglomania
- sassy black gal/where’s ma baby?
- irascible 'grounds keeper Willy' Irish sidekick (the standout Joon thesps remain Hye-ja Kim as the hall-o-fame psycho nurture mom from 'Mother' and the brilliant, monsterous tadpole-on-a-bender from 'The Host'.)
So, what do we have here? Tired, Hollywood action movie tropes, high concept, shallow graphic novel-ly writing, and uneven acting all wrapped up in a dynamite production package that sadly has the - let's just say it - musty transatlantic whiff of a Seoul sell-out.
Sorry Boon, but, it takes two hands to hold an audience and on this one you seem to have stuck all the relevant appendages outside the train for seven minutes...including your head...