#16: IN THE LOST LANDS

 

STARRING: Dave Bautista, Milla Jovovich and Arly Jover. Written by either 15 monkeys on one typewriter or Constantin Werner and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Budget $55 million. Running time 101 minutes. 

Jesus H. Christ. Do I really have to try and write a synopsis for this piece of shit? Would it make even one iota of difference to you, I mean I doubt any of you are actually going to go and see this, I mean seriously if you had even any niggling sensation that, just from the poster alone you have to know this is a piece of shit?

Set in the far flung future following a war, blah blah blah, Milla is a witch who seems immortal and grants wishes and Dave, is a legendary hunter and together they're going into the Lost Lands to look for a werewolf in the Lost Lands. Filmed exclusively against green screen and featuring a palette of colours as broad as sepia and night blue this is an ugly film filled with shitty tracking shots across digital backdrops with acts of violence thrown up over us every few minutes to stop us from going to sleep, although it didn't stop me. Characters are introduced to be slaughtered by a demented church warrior in a secondary story arc that ends abruptly before the third act robbing the film of an even vaguely entertaining through arc. Bautista is big, bloated and boring, but not as boring as Jovovich who seems to have cornered the market in female action stars. This one's directed by her husband who also directed his wooden wife in the Resident Evil films.

Nothing new to offer, apparently based on a RR Martin short story, he who wrote Game of Thrones books.

The action in this is shit, the acting is shit, the characters are shit, the look of it is shit, the script is shit, the motivation is shit, the CGI is shit, the soundtrack is shit, the special effects are shit, there wasn't one thing about this that wasn't shit. Indeed this wasn't even shit enough to become funny, this was just shit from beginning to end. And not in the way that 'bad' became 'good', but shit in the way that only shit can be shit. As someone who has to pick up dog shit on a daily basis, since I stupidly got myself a dog, I have to deal with more than my fair share of shit on a daily basis, so I'm really quite annoyed with myself today since having picked up not one but THREE big bags of dog shit today I then took myself off to the cinema and sat down to watch this huge, steaming pile of shit. The worst thing about dog shit is feeling the heat of it in the palm of your hand through the thin plastic bag. But at least that only last a few seconds before its thrown into a bin. But not so with this, I had to sit there for a whole 101 minutes of unrelenting, middling shit. I wouldn't have minded it so much if it had been explosive diarrhoea, but no, I had to put up with a pile of thin, pathetic sticks of shit.

3/10