While a heated dispute on the Entertainmentopia Forums over the past few days as to the acting merits of Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) all of those doubts and inhibitions can be put to rest after viewing last weekend’s The Scorpion King, because without The Rock, this just wouldn’t be a good movie. Take what I say with a grain of salt, but The Rock can act, and act very well. While the script of The Scorpion King doesn’t leave much room for a story, or fleshed out lines and character development we are used to seeing in the two previous movies in The Mummy franchise, King uses the amazing screen presence of The Rock, and some over the top action to get the job done.

The Scorpion King tells the story of Mathayus (The Rock), one of three professional assassins left of an ancient race that live in the desert badlands of Egypt before the time of the pharaohs and the pyramids. Mathayus is hired by a coalition of the remaining nomadic clans to seek out the sorceress (Kelly Hu) being held by Memnon, the evil ruler of the land. He uses the sorceresses powers to win every battle, and is slowly conquering the known land. When Mathayus discovers her, he kidnaps the beauty and retreats to the safety of the desert.

After a series of action-filled battles, and one very cool outing in a cave during a sand storm, the movie makes its way to the final battle at the city of Gomorrah where some of the movies’ best action sequences take place.

The Scorpion King is like a low-budget Mummy because of it’s small $60 million dollar value. The special effects are notably toned down when compared to the two previous movies in the series, and the movie is also notably shorter. On the plus side, Universal, the studio releasing this movie, should not have any trouble making the movie into a very nice cash cow.

The acting from most of the supporting characters is on par with the cheese flavored acting of the first two movies, nothing should be taken very seriously for the fact that it isn’t meant to be. The movie rides on the cheese-factor to give it the edge to stand out from all of the other movies set in ancient Egypt. While the movie theatre I saw this in had the volume way to low for such an action fest, it still was a great show.

The only thing that really bugs you about it is you know what happens to the character in the later movie. Wanting him to win and become king makes you feel like you are going for the bad guy, which is almost sad because I like the character more as a good guy than anything else, but that is just me, and I have been told I am a nut-case sometimes.

You will have to look beyond some of the major inconsistencies in the character between the early scenes in The Mummy Returns and the entire Scorpion King movie, but what you get in the end is an enjoyable movie experience that you can get a tub-o-butter a Cherry Pepsi and enjoy one and a half hours of guilty entertainment.

Closing Note: The Scorpion King was number one on opening weekend with an estimated $36.2 million dollars.

I guess the saying “better late than never” comes into play when talking about Big Trouble. Originally to be released on September 21st of last year, the movie was delayed because of the cowardly terrorist attacks on the United States. It would seem to be taboo to show a movie that involves the passing around of a nuclear weapon that eventually ends up on an airplane that is high jacked by two dim-witted criminals.

Big Trouble finally made release last week, and I can honestly say, the movie is everything I would have expected. Big Trouble is based on a novel by humor columnist Dave Barry, who writes for the Miami Herald. The movie is about self-proclaimed loser Eliot Arnold (Tim Allen) who is recently divorced, owns a struggling advertising firm, and just bought a Geo.

The movie features a high caliber ensemble of actors who all lend the movie their respective talent. The greatest part of the movie is it resembles Guy Ritchie’s Snatch by allowing all the characters to overlap once and again. As stated before the movie uses the plot vehicle of a nuclear weapon (that resembles a garbage disposal) to bring the cast together. Eliot and his son Matt interact with Arthur and Anna Herk (Stanley Tucci and Rene Russo) after Matt is playing a school game called “killer” and is forced to soak their daughter Jenny (Zooey Deschanel). Puggy (Jason Lee in an awesome role) is a drifter who finds himself in love with Arthur’s housemaid Nina after she mistakes him for Jesus.

Along the way the main characters run into two cops Monica Romero (Janeane Garofolo) and Walter Kramitz (Patrick Warburton), two FBI agents Pat Greer (Omar Epps) and Alan Seitz (Heavy D), and two really stupid criminals Eddie (Johnny Knoxville) and Snake (Tom Sizemore). While the bomb will eventually bring the entire cast together at the airport, the movie really shines on the humor of the script.

The movie has some generally funny moments especially when introducing the characters for the first time. No one would have though Arthur Herk had such an amazing foot-fetish. And a surprising cameo by Martha Stewart just brings down the house when coupled with the psychedelic toad.

Really shinning out in this movie is notably Jason Lee, Tim Allen, and Dennis Farina who plays a hitman contracted to take out Herk. Farina’s character seems taken directly from Snatch while being just as funny as ever. While Lee is beloved by all for his roles in Kevin Smith’s cult classics, Allen has had limited success on the big screen. Allen as Eliot Arnold seemed like a perfect choice because of the similarities between Allen and Dave Barry. While he doesn’t get top billing, he is first in alphabetical order, so in a sense this is a Tim Allen movie.

Coming out of the theatre on Saturday Night completed a perfect night. The movie offers laughs by the dozens and manages to keep the humor level up for the entire movie (notably, once again, by Andy Richter’s security guard characters). Big Trouble, bombed at the box office this weekend. While not the funniest comedy this year, it sure wasn’t the worst, or anything close to average. If you are looking for a funny movie with a great cast and a super script look no further than Big Trouble.

Panic Room is a David Fincher movie. There is no doubt about it. From the very opening credit sequence to the closing credit reel, Panic Room has the style, and darkness that inhabit all of Fincher’s other movies including Fight Club, and Se7en.

One thing that David Fincher is known for is his high-budget, engrossing opening sequences and tricky camera effects. Many, including myself, relay the same feelings for a similar director, with a similar style, Sam Raimi.

Panic Room takes place in an 19th century New York Townhouse of sorts. This three floor house was once inhabited by a rich businessman who became so paranoid about anything in his later years that he had a massive security system installed, along with a panic room. A panic room is a small room filled with rations, video monitors, and it’s own phone line, so in the advent of a break in, the family could survive months if they had to. Surrounding the room is four feet of concrete with a generous helping of steel, in one word, impenetrable.

The films main character, Meg (Jodie Foster), is recently divorced from her husband and moves into the house with her daughter Sarah after the old businessman’s death. Unknown to her, a small fortune has been holed up in a safe inside of the room, and when one of the old man’s grandsons becomes disgruntled by the lack of inheritance he received, he enlists the help of Burnham (Forest Whitaker) and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) to get his inheritance. Yes, that Dwight Yoakam, the country singer seems to be expanding, and the scary part is, he does a decent job playing the psychopath that is Raoul.

When Foster’s character discovers the burglars in her house, she takes refuge in the panic room with her diabetic daughter. The film then focuses on the perpetrators various attempts to drive Meg and Sarah from the room so they can break into the safe.

While several plot points and actions are more than cliché the movie doesn’t rely on them to step across the finish line. Focusing on the vision of the subject matter, and how the camera is the audience’s eye into this fictional world, David Fincher makes even the simplest thing very dramatic. At several points during the movie the camera makes it’s way through the banister bars on the staircase for a very subtle, yet dramatic visual effect. Also, at several points during the movie, Fincher uses the same fly by effect he used in Fight Club when appearing from the narrators trash can at work. A close pass by normal household objects leaves you with a sense of awe.

As I mentioned above, the opening credit sequence is so Fincher, there is no other way to describe it. Taking a break from the high energy, techno openings of Fight Club and Se7en, Fincher presents the credits as though they are part of the world. Showing various buildings around New York City, the 3D sans serif characters seem to be apart of, branching off of buildings, casting shadows and reflections. It is very hard to describe, but very, very cool to see.

While falling into more than one cliché here and there, Panic Room is an excellent movie, and very suspenseful at a few chosen times. The acting is very well done and the characters are believable with a script that isn’t full of tacky one-liners and pop-culture references. While I love one-liners and pop-culture references as much as the next guy, it was good to get a break from it all, seeing as I will be experiencing comedy genius next week with the long-overdue release of Big Trouble.

Sony seems to be rocking the box office the last couple of months. With the awesome Panic Room in March and Spiderman last week, now we have The New Guy, a rather cliché, but enjoyable, teen movie about a geek who goes from getting beat up to helping those on the bottom of the tier.

The problem I have with movies like this is the way the stereotypical characters are portrayed. We have the cool guys on top, with their girlfriends who want nothing more than to have their clothes stripped off and their bodies examined by high school boys looking for nothing more than pie and Coke, or at least that is what I have been told. As you move down you get to the real people, aka normal kids who enjoy going to the mall, having real friends who don’t rely on the talking of others to improve their self-esteem to “I think I can” levels, and actually have something called personality.

The New Guy focuses on Dizzy Harrison (DJ Qualls) as he attempts to be expelled from his current school so he transfer to the school across the tracks and start a new life as a cool, reformed prison inmate. Aiding him in his quest is Eddie “Undercover Brother” Griffin who seems to be really struggling for something that could be called work in the unemployment office. Fortunately, for the audience, Griffin is hilarious in the parts he is in, as is the disturbing image of Horatio Sanz in fitness clothing.

No matter how hard Dizzy tries to be expelled the school’s nurse, who needs two more brain cells to make a pair, and some higher cut shirts, feels that he is just crying out for attention and convinces his dad, Lyle Lovett, that he needs to spend more time with his son.

As I stated before the main problem, and overall theme, is so cliché that you can guess every plot point as it happens, if you want to call them plot points. Dizzy gets expelled, goes to the new school, becomes cool, identifies with the geeks, uses status to help, gets found out, gets the girl, possibly gets some. Doesn’t that sound like your High School years?

Not to say The New Guy is all bad. It has a wealth of celebrity cameos that would make George Lucas piss himself. Tommy Lee (Method of Mayhem, Motley Crue) shows up at the ending party, with two women none-the-less. And the surprise appearance by David “Shut up KITT” Hasselhoff is just the icing on the “What the Hell” cake. Also appearing are Vanilla “Paycheck, Paycheck Baby” Ice and Tony Hawk who has some of the funnier moments in the movie.

If anything The New Guy is an enjoyable way to waste a couple of hours, or if you don’t want to see Spider-Man again (although I don’t think that is possible). See it if you have the time, but if you want to really laugh, rent Not Another Teen Movie, or answer your Spidey-sense and see the web-slinger again.

Image a happy little puppy walking down the street. As he walks along, he thinks of very happy puppy thoughts. Maybe the dog he sniffed while walking down this street, or maybe about the “present” he is going to leave in a certain someone’s dorm room later tonight. The happy little puppy tries to cross the street and…BAM! he is plowed by a two ton truck that reduces his body to a splattered mess all over the road. Bits and pieces are everywhere, and even if you tried, there would be no possible way to construct this tangled mess of entrails into what we would consider a small animal. This relates directly to a new mess I have discovered, it goes by the name Rollerball, and no matter how much of this contraption is left, you could never reconstruct it into anything we would consider a movie.

The biggest problem, is this movie could have been cool if not for the massive editing done to bring it down to a PG-13 rating. Cut away shots, incomplete sentences, and a very obviously blurred sauna scene are so blatantly obvious, a three year old on a iMac could have made a better movie fit together.

The film stars LL Cool J and Chris Klein as two Rollerball greats who are looking for fast cars, faster money, and even faster women. LL gets all three, but Chris has to settle for just two, as his woman, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, works out in the nude and has a nasty gash above her eye. Knowing the other women in the film, one might think she became critically injured when going for some stick (wink, wink).

Looking back at the track record for the actors and crew, you wonder where in the hell this move came from. John McTiernan directed Die Hard for god sakes. I won’t say that Chris Klein is a good actor, but the very least he had some moments in American Pie, American Pie 2, and maybe Say it Isn’t So. LL Cool J was damn cool in Deep Blue Sea, but any acting career these people hope to have in the future won’t be based on the tagline, “Rollerball’s Chris Klein” or “From the director of Rollerball” because I am turning the opposite way, and running like hell.

In any event, with the low box office numbers garnered by this piece of trash, maybe not enough people will be affected by it, but all I can say is I have been severely traumatized, and Rollerball has shown movies a new low.

Resident Evil is one of my favorite game series to date. I didn’t have the curse of owning a PlayStation, so my first endeavor into the series was Resident Evil 2 for the Nintendo 64. Later I would try my hand at Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil: CODE Veronica for the Dreamcast, and later this year, gamers will we treated to two new RE games on the Nintendo GameCube. So with all of the background, and expectation, does Resident Evil (RE) make a successful video game to movie transition?

Holy Freaking-Yes!

Despite what some critics may say, and only some, the movie totally rocks. From the minute I stepped into the theatre, and saw the familiar Umbrella logo on the big screen, I was amazed, and overjoyed that this was finally happening. The movie starts off with a killer credit sequence setting up who the Umbrella Corporation is for non-fans. Constintin Films tried really hard to set this movie up for people who are not familiar with the series.

Fans of the series will recognize some of the monsters, such as zombies, zombie dogs, and the ever cool Licker who actually evolves before your eyes when given fresh DNA. While the story may not be too above average, it does present some nice twists and turns that keep you guessing, and the best part, the movie actually produces some legitimate scares, as well as some T and A.

The Marilyn Manson score has already received high praise in our soundtrack review, but on the big screen with a high decibel level, it is even cooler.

The best part of the whole experience is that you know a sequel is guaranteed. The movie ends in just the right spot where we could see Leon and Claire barreling down the street in a police car being chased by that blasted tanker truck.

In the end, Resident Evil was worth every penny it received this weekend at the box office (around 18 million dollars), and I can honestly say I will be making more than a few trips to the theatre to see some live action zombie movie. I know I seriously doubted Paul W.S. Anderson’s potential in doing this right, but I don’t think the movie could have had a better director.

Three months later…

Admitting the fact that most of MTV’s movies have sucked is Barney Gumble admitting that he has a drinking problem. So when I noticed that this was an MTV Film, I cringed, but decided to see it. I’m glad that I did.

Orange County is about one boy’s dream of leaving the city in which he grew up, and going to Stanford to study under the leadership of one of his favorite authors and professors. Add to the fact that his parents are whacked out and divorced, his brother is a pill popping basket case, and his best friends seem to have some sort of fascination with getting lit up, jumping off of things, blowing things up, and fondling each other.

Shaun’s (Colin Hanks) high school guidance counselor sends in the wrong transcript, which leads him to receive a rejection letter from Stanford. He spends the rest of the movie using various assets at hand to get himself into the college of his dreams. Helping along the way is his brother Lance (Jack Black) who likes to keep different kinds of drugs in Aspirin bottles, and ask for his brother’s urine.

While the movie is nothing like the gross-out comedies Not Another Teen Movie and American Pie, it does have some generally funny moments, with some notable characters in supporting roles. Ben Stiller shows up as a fireman, Chevy Chase (who surprising enough, is still alive) plays the high school principal, and John Lithgow plays Shaun’s over-achieving, money-hungry dad.

The movie also has a great soundtrack going for it. Featuring new music from The Offspring and Foo Fighters, as well as regurgitated music from Crazy Town among others.

Being a comedy is hard to do with the bar raised so high by the previously stated movies, but Orange County manages to be very fun, and entertaining. While most of the events may not seem plausible, it sure is a good time.

Not Another Teen Movie is not going to win any awards in anyone’s book. The movie is cliché, the characters lack anything resemble character (and therefore a brain), and the acting is sub par at best, but that is what makes this movie so much fun to watch.