Mini Book Review: The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland
Well, first order of business:
I haven't died since my last post.
In August.
Of last year.
Nor was I raptured in October. Harold Camping was wrong again.
I have, however, been a victim of a busy schedule and probably some degree of overall burnout.
Anyway, new year - new goals, which include more writing, less me (and possibly a new bike...), and a few other things that are long overdue.
Let's start with the first.
For Christmas, I found myself the owner of a new Kindle Fire. I fully accept that the Fire is, out of the box, basically an Amazon Vending Machine. I'm good with that. It's got potential, and I like the form factor better than the iPad.
I'd gotten my mom the DVDs of the Swedish versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I'd watched them last year, and Mom had been reading the books, so we ended up more or less swapping. (NB - I haven't seen the new American version of the first film, so any comparisons I make between the books and the films will refer to the Swedish productions.)
What I'd like to do here is capture some of my thoughts on the series without spoiling too many important plot points. Thus this won't be a full-on review but rather some loosely connected thoughts and observations. Bear with me while I try to re-engage the writing cogs.
I suspect that most people are familiar with the basic outline of the books - Swedish investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist finds himself drawn into an increasingly complex web of conspiracies when he's asked to help investigate a decades-old mystery and makes the acquaintance of hacker Lisbeth Salander and her aforementioned tattoo.
The first thing to note is that the original Swedish title of the book - Män som hatar kvinno - translates as Men Who Hate Women. That proves to be the thread that ties the entire series together, and indeed the thread that has defined most of Salander's life.
(Larsson witnessed a rape when he was young, and never forgave himself for failing to help the victim. The theme of the trilogy is derived from that event.)
In telling Salander's story of victimization - initially at the hands of her father and later at the hands of nearly every authority figure she encounters - Larsson also addresses issues of gender inequality in the workplace, in government, and in the perceptions of the population as a whole.
Lisbeth's brilliant intellect and single-minded thirst for revenge is set against her tiny, doll-like physique. Her refusal to conform to social norms is used in the second and third books to attack her in the press and in the courtroom.1
Annika, Blomkvist's sister (later Salander's lawyer) draws on similarities between her youthful behavior and Lisbeth's to point out the double standards at work. Erika Berger, Blomkvist's married lover (and a very shrewd businesswoman) finds herself under attack because of her sexual habits. Female police inspectors in the story are looked down on by their male counterparts.
An interesting thing to notice is that Blomkvist (in the books - they leave out most of this in the movies) is portrayed as quite the player. During the course of the books, Blomkvist carries on extended affairs with:
- Erika Berger - his married lover who he has been with off and on for 20 year or so.
- Cecilia Vanger - a woman who he investigates in connection with a decades-old possible murder.
- Lisbeth Salander - who seduces him during the investigation of the Vanger case, and with whom he has a fairly lengthy relationship.
- Harriet Vanger - Cecilia's long-lost cousin.
- Monica Figuerola - a special police investigator helping to work out the conspiracy surrounding Salander's father.
I'm not sure if Blomkvist is written this way in order to serve as an example within the story of a man who can relate to women as equals, or if he's written as a typical Swedish male and I'm simply trying to view Swedish attitudes about sex through an American lens, or if there's something else going on. The end result is that Blomkvist is clearly not a white-hat good guy, but is instead somewhat ethically suspect. Ordinarily, I tend to like characters with some moral ambiguity, since it makes them more interesting, but I've got an issue with this sort of thing.2
There are a few other interesting characters spread across the books. One of the most interesting, in my opinion, is Alexander Zalachenko. Zalachenko, a Russian assassin who defects to Sweden in the 1970's, is Lisbeth's father. The Swedish authorities recognize the value of the information Zalachenko can provide, and consequently give him a long leash, turning a blind eye to his violent habits and criminal endeavors. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Zalachenko's value diminishes, but it's far too late to rein him in. His activities form the nucleus of the conspiracies against Salander, but it's clear that the Swedish authorities who cleaned up after him and failed to control him are at least as culpable as he is. What makes him interesting is that he's not just evil for the sake of being evil. His actions seem consistent within the limits of his own self-interest. He's aware enough to manipulate others into doing what he needs to be done, he thinks through the consequences of his actions, and he needs a motivation to do things beyond simply causing problems for a hero to solve.3
Overall, I enjoyed the books. Having already seen the movies, I knew generally what to expect, but there was enough new and expanded material to keep me interested, especially the more detailed insight into Lisbeth's character. The nuggets of Swedish political history that are sprinkled through the books give them some grounding in actual events, which is a nice touch. Parts can be difficult to read - the assault on Salander in the first book, and some of the graphic descriptions of crimes throughout leave little to the imagination - but such scenes are important to advancing the plot.
As a set of interconnected mysteries, the books work very well, and I highly recommend them on the strength of that alone. If you happen to find topics of social justice and the treatment of women in different layers of society are more your thing, you'll find a good helping of those in here, too.
-Jay
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1In some ways reminiscent of the way women like Monica Lewinsky and Casey Anthony have been portrayed in the media. Guilt or innocence often seems secondary to digging up lurid personal details.
2I suppose it's worth mentioning that all of Blomkvist's liasons are consensual, and none of his partners have an expectation of long-term monogamy. Nevertheless, his characterization reminds me a bit too much of people who I know who think with their penises.
3Writing convincing villains is hard. Too often you end up with a 2-dimensional character that exists solely for the purpose of doing bad things. Like Darth Vader. He was nothing but a glorified errand boy. When George Lucas tried to give Vader some depth in the prequel trilogy, all he really succeeded in doing was establishing that Vader was a whiny, arrogant errand boy. Or consider the typical characterization of the devil, who seems to turn up for no reason other than to function as an agent of evil. That's a topic for another day.
That’s Offensive!
(The following post, or parts of it, have been bouncing around in my head for a couple of weeks. It hasn't come together the way I hoped it would, so I'm putting it out there in the hope of sparking some comment discussion.)
Through some odd coincidence, I've recently had the opportunity to be on both sides of the offended/not offended table.
a couple of weeks back, I rented a copy of a movie that's likely to become a cult favorite - Hobo with a Shotgun.
I'd initially planned to write a review of it, figuring that Rutger Hauer as a shotgun-wielding hobo trying to clean up a corrupt town might be good for some Badgering.
The first, I don't know, 20 minutes were pretty well what I expected. Then it brought in some elements that seemed maybe a bit over the top, and ultimately went down some paths that I found to be grossly unnecessary and just vile.1
While I ultimately did finish Hobo, it came very close to earning a place on my list of Films That I Couldn't Force Myself To Sit Through. That list currently has one entry.2
Now, as it happened, fresh off of my encounter with Hobo, there was some mandatory training at work.
We get a lot of mandatory training, including training on avoiding and preventing sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace. I'd been through this training a few weeks back, but some friends in another department were in a later session. There are some videos that go along with the training, and they're fairly graphic in content and language.
My session showed one of the three. The other two were "suggested", which I interpreted as meaning "optional", so I took the "don't watch them" option.
My friends saw a different one in their session, and chose to watch the others at their desks.
Now, the video they saw in their session was, according to them, useful and appropriate. I have no reason to doubt them on that.
The video that they watched at their desks that I didn't see, they both found inappropriately graphic - to the extent that someone watching similar material at work outside of the context of official training could well have been written up for it. Again, I have no reason to doubt them on that.
The video that all three of us saw is the interesting one. When I watched it, I thought that it was somewhat raw and had some crude language in it, but didn't find it unusually shocking.
They did, and they told me about it quite clearly.3
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that my knee-jerk reaction to their concerns was to think "it didn't really bother me much, so it shouldn't bother them."
I hope that didn't come out in my initial response to them, because if it did, I was a complete assclown.
The fact of the matter is that whether I found the video offensive or not is completely immaterial to whether or not they did. That point took a few minutes to sink in, but part of the reason that it finally did was because my reaction to Hobo was still fresh in my mind. I don't get to declare my perspective to be the correct one simply because it happens to be mine.
As it turns out, the question of whether or not someone finds a particular video (for example)4 offensive isn't even the interesting question. Why someone finds a particular video offensive is more intriguing because discussion of those reasons offers opportunities for people to learn from one another.
It can be a tricky discussion to have, though, because of the all-too-common view that we have some right to not be offended, and if I dare question your offense, I'm guilty of violating that right. Such discussions can easily collapse into arguments and personal attacks.
But you have no more right to not be offended than you have a right to drive around in a brand new red Corvette. Neither do I. Neither does anyone else. That doesn't mean that I have a right to go out of my way to offend you just for the sport of it, or that crudeness and vulgarity should be the norm.
I think that deliberate offensiveness can serve a purpose - witness the cigarette warnings used in Canada - because offensive things can stick in your head whereas milder approaches might not. I also think that it's sometimes a good idea to seek out things that you find offensive and try to understand the other perspective.5
Now, the thing that I'm having trouble with is this: Given that certain things offend me (or you), just how much effort should I put into avoiding those things? Should I go out of my way to avoid them? Should I accept that some level of offensiveness is just a part of life and deal with it? Should I develop a thicker skin? What's an acceptable daily allowance of offense?
Feedback wanted!
-Jay
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1It was suggested to me by a colleague that perhaps it was necessary to make the villains in the film extra-reprehensible in order to make a shotgun-toting vigilante vagrant into a more sympathetic character. That's a good point.
2As distinct from the very long list of Films That I Have No Desire To Sit Through Again. That list includes some excellent films, such as The Exorcist, and some not-so-excellent films, such as anything directed by Uwe Boll.
3If there's one thing I can usually count on these two for, it's brutal honesty.
4Or word. Profanity can be a fun topic to discuss. Odds are that you use a somewhat different vocabulary when you're by yourself vice with a group of people, and a different vocabulary if you're in a social situation vice a business setting.
5Politics and religion tend to be the heavy hitters in this scenario. Remember that understanding another perspective doesn't obligate you to agree with it.
Movie Review – Speed Racer (2008)
When I started elementary school in the mid-1970s, my TV diet consisted of PBS standards like Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
It didn't take long for my classmates to suggest alternatives. One of those was Speed Racer, the American dub of the Japanese series Mahha GoGoGo.
My mom objected to shows like this and the old Spider-Man cartoon most vocally on the grounds of the excessive violence, which served only to increase my desire to see them. Forbidden fruit and all that.
Speed Racer, to my young eyes, was all about the car - the Mach 5.
This was gonna be my first car...
Speed Racer and the Mach 5 might be claimed as a source of inspiration for many vehicle-themed shows that later followed - Knight Rider, for example.
So, a few years back when the Wachowski Brothers, still riding the cachet they'd built with The Matrix1 and its sequels, got attached to a live-action version of Speed Racer, I was intrigued.
The film tanked at the box office when it was released in 2008, and drew generally negative reviews. I picked up the DVD about a year ago at Target for the princely sum of $5, but it gathered dust on the shelf until last night, when a combination of insomnia and lack of anything better to do led me to pop open a beer and throw Speed Racer into the player.
I'll say up front that not even reviewing films like Mega Shark Vs. Crocosaurus could have prepared me for the Wachowski Brothers' take on Speed Racer.
Let's begin.
We meet a young Speed Racer in school, unable to concentrate on his work. Constantly caught up in daydreams about racing, he's considered an outsider by his classmates and a poor student by his teacher. We come to learn that his father builds race cars, and his brother Rex drives them. These aren't just any race cars, either. They're impossibly high-performance machines that race on tracks that look more like fancy Hot-Wheels setups:
Not your father's race track
In Speed Racer's world, physics doesn't seem to have much use. Cars spin, flip, drift around turns, spring over other cars, and travel at speeds approaching 500 MPH.
Speed's brother, Rex, is a very talented racer, but has a fallout with their father, Pops (a horribly under-utilized John Goodman), and leaves home on a dark and stormy night.
Shortly after, a racing accident kills Rex, who was living under accusations of cheating. The Racer family is crushed. Mom (played by Susan Sarandon, who spends most of her scenes looking like she's trying to find an escape from the set) takes Rex's death particularly hard, but provides the emotional glue that holds the family together. (Ms. Sarandon was given possibly the most well-written dialog in the entire film. Nevertheless, one must wonder just what sort of leverage the Wachowski's had on her to get her into this thing.)
Speed grows up (portrayed by Emile Hirsch) to become a fine racer in his own right, and after dramatically winning a local race, is approached by Royalton (Roger Allam) to join his stable of racers. The Racer family, long an independent racing team, is suspicious of Royalton's offer, but goes with him to visit his headquarters, accompanied by Speed's long-time girlfriend, Trixie2 (Christina Ricci).
After the initial visit, Speed and Trixie discuss Royalton's offer and Speed's future.
Trixie and Speed
The Wachowski's aren't subtle. Anyone who can't figure out that Royalton isn't one of the good guys is either dead or asleep (which, by this point in the film wouldn't be out of the question.) We can tell because his eyebrows have a sort of villainous arch to them.
All he's missing is a waxed mustache...
Really, they could have made it a little less obvious. Anyhow, when Speed declines Royalton's offer of indentured servitude employment, Royalton tells Speed that the Racer family name won't even have any cache on a late night infomercial, let alone in the racing world. (Apparently the sport of auto racing in the reality of Speed Racer is little more than a front for corporate manipulation of stock prices, and the winners of every major race are negotiated beforehand.)
Sure enough, before you know it, things have gone bad for the family.
Enter the mysterious RacEr X and (in what has to be one of the most ridiculous names ever) Inspector Detector of the CIB (or something - it's a group that investigates corruption in the racing business).
Racer X (left, duh.) and Inspector Detector
They have a proposal for Speed - team up with RacEr X and some other driver who we were introduced to a few minutes ago that I didn't bother to mention to win a big road race that will lead the third driver to give up a file he has on corrupt drivers and team owners and put people like Royalton with funky eyebrows out of business. (You'll note that Inspector Detector is clearly a good guy - nary an arched eyebrow in sight.)
Speed and Trixie decide to accept the offer against the wishes of Speed's parents, and head to the race under cover of a skiing trip.
The bad guys put a bounty on Speed's team, and automotive hijinks ensue as the various drivers deploy whatever dirty tricks they have at their disposal to win.
Some dramatic tension unfolds as the race goes through the same cave that Speed's brother, Rex was killed in - a stretch of road that RacEr X seems unusually familiar with.
Speed and company ultimately prevail and win the race, only to discover that the third driver really didn't have a file on all the corrupt players, and was simply using Speed and RacEr X to win the race and boost his father's stock price.
Disillusioned, Speed heads home, but has finally used his keen senses of observation and logic to almost figure out that RacEr X showed up shortly after Rex's death, and that Rex's body was unrecognizably burned, and that RacEr X drives like Rex and knows Speed's moves! OMG! RacEr X must BE Rex!
Speed soon confronts the mysterious masked man about it, who removes his hood to prove to Speed that he isn't his brother, but knows that his brother would be proud of the man Speed has become. (Speed, demonstrating that he's not the sharpest tool in the garage, appears never to have heard of plastic surgery...)
The third driver's sister shows up with an invitation for Speed to participate in the Grand Prix, which is his life's dream. The family has less than two days to rebuild Speed's car and get to the race, which we know they'll do for no other reason than that this would be a very bizarre way to end the movie.
The Grand Prix race, as presented by the Wachowski's is an eye-scorching, ear-splitting eruption of garish color and noise:
Really, the whole movie looks like this...
Basically, if you've ever played a Mario Kart game, the Grand Prix is Rainbow Road with the volume turned full-up on the TV. The long and the short of it is that Speed wins, the Racer family regains its lost honor, and the corrupt businessmen like Royalton are exposed for the wretched villainous scum they truly are.
Meh.
This was a very difficult movie to watch for a number of reasons.
First off, the characters were uniformly uninteresting - even the leads. John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, and Christina Ricci are all talented, but they aren't really given anything to work with here. Emile Hirsch seemed to be asleep most of the time, even in the "intense" racing scenes, and it went downhill from there. Even the Mega Shark films have something to their characters that makes them less of a chore to watch.
Second, as the screenshot of the Grand Prix should illustrate, the visual style of the film seemed designed mainly to make the viewer's eyes bleed. I understand the challenges in making a live-action film from a cartoon. Trying to keep the original visual style probably won't work, but neither will going with a fully real-world approach. Nevertheless, the source material for Speed Racer would have allowed a much more realistic approach that might have made the film less exhausting to endure.
Third, the characters were all different from how they "should" have been. In the cartoon, Speed was more confident, Trixie was less aggressive, Racer X more edgy. Here, we have a Speed who can't seem to look anyone in the eye, Trixie exuding a smoldering sexuality that seems out-of-place (I think that's really more just Ricci...), and Racer X who never lives up to his potential. This wasn't Speed Racer so much as something that superficially resembled Speed Racer.
Fourth, and finally, by the end of the film, nothing had really changed. The family still thinks Rex is dead. Pops still builds his own cars without any sponsorship. Speed is still racing, and the racing world, now that its most corrupt players have been rooted out, is the honorable world that Speed and his family believed it to be at the start of the film.
They're all right back where they started, and I'm out five bucks.
-Jay
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1As visually innovative as that film was at the time, it just doesn't grab me much now for some reason . And the sequels always seemed unnecessary to me.
2In the original cartoon, it was easy to come to the conclusion that Trixie was Speed's sister, especially if you were watching the show at six or seven years old. Even when I watched most of the series a few years back, their relationship still seemed fairly low-key. Christina Ricci, however, brings a more aggressive Trixie to the screen. It's a PG-rated movie, so she doesn't go overboard with it, but still...
Star Trek as The A-Team
From Miss Cellania...
I wouldn't find this nearly as funny if I hadn't been a nearly fanatical watcher of both Star Trek and The A-Team as a kid, and recently watched the big-screen remake of The A-Team (which was much better than I personally expected...)
-Jay
Movie Review: Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus
The fine folks at Asylum followed up their blockbuster hit, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, with another stellar production:
Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus
I'm thinking that the Mega Shark might be the American answer to Godzilla. Or not.
MSvC, as I'll subsequently abbreviate the title, stands unique among films in that it pits Steve Urkel, The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, some dude that kinda looks like Pierce Brosnan but isn't, and some actress I've never heard of against a pair of poorly rendered monsters.
Jaleel White Will Never Live This Down...
Steve Urkel plays U.S. Navy Lieutenant Terry McCormick who specializes in sharks. He's on the USS Gibson (a nod to Debbie Gibson's role in the original MSvGO), trying to confirm the death of the Mega Shark, when it shows up out of nowhere and sinks the ship (possibly a commentary on the state of Gibson's career...). McCormick loses his girlfriend in the carnage, and is the only survivor of the attack. McCormick has developed some sort of sonic widget that can either attract or repel sharks, depending on what the screenwriter needs it to do at any given point in time.
Not Pierce Brosnan plays Nigel Putnam, a soldier of fortune in Africa who specializes in ghost hunting.
At First Glance, He Might Fool You. Then He Speaks...
Or killing strange animals. Or something. Putnam gets into the act when some random tall, blond lawyer lady approaches him in a bar in the Congo and asks him to kill whatever it is that's been eating the workers at a mine nearby. They fly into the area, and the lawyer lady (inexplicably dressed in a short, tight dress and heels despite being in the jungle...) gets eaten by a giant crocodile (Crocosaurus, duh). The croc also tries to eat Putnam, but somehow he manages to tranquillize the thing from inside its mouth, and it spits him out and falls asleep. I was wondering why he didn't try to rescue the lawyer lady at that point, since she was swallowed whole and probably hadn't been digested yet. Maybe he just doesn't care much for lawyers.
The actress I've never heard of (and I'm using the term "actress" kind of loosely) shows up at McCormick's debriefing, and offers him a chance at some closure by joining a team that is trying to hunt down and kill the shark. This is Special Agent Hutchinson. She looks very severe, and speaks in short, clipped sentences, and may actually have been carved out of a block of wood.
That Look On Her Face - It's Like A Mask!
About halfway through the film, she takes off her suit jacket and spends the rest of the film in a tight tank top. This, I suspect, is a strong hint of why she's in the movie at all. I imagine that somewhere in development, someone realized that the movie failed to meet the SyFy Channel's MCR (minimum cleavage requirement), so they added the character of Hutchinson to cover that.
Anyway, Hutchinson works for Admiral Calvin, played by The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager. Calvin's main motivation for killing the shark appears to be so that he can smoke the most expensive cigar made. Personally, I don't get it, but by the time they introduced that plot point, I was willing to go along with whatever they said.
This Movie Really Needed A Doctor. A Script Doctor...
Back to Putnam. He manages to somehow get the sleeping croc onto a freight ship, along with some eggs. (Eggs? Where did eggs come from? There weren't any eggs before. It's like when the development staff realized they were low on cleavage, they also decided to add in some extra random plot points because the plot wasn't already convoluted enough.) For some inane reason, Putnam wants to take the croc and its eggs to the U.S. Why? Really, why? Does he want to corner the market on croc-skin accessories for the ladies? Didn't he see King Kong? Doesn't he know that bringing giant, vicious creatures to a densely populated city is a sure way to send said city to hell in a handbasket? Whatever the reason, the shark begins to attack the boat. (nit pick: both the shark and the croc tend to randomly change scale throughout the film. At one point, we're told that the croc is 1500 feet long. The croc is slightly longer than the shark. The shark, early on, sinks a U.S. Navy Battleship, which is ~900 feet long. The shark is clearly much shorter than the ship. Yet the dorsal fin of the shark is shown to rise out of the water higher than the mast antennas on the battleship. It's like the monsters are made of Expand-o-Foam.) During the attack, the croc wakes up and escapes. The boat sinks, and Putnam barely escapes. He washes ashore and heads to a bar, where he meets Hutchinson, who recruits him to help with the burgeoning creature eradication effort.
Back on Admiral Calvin's aircraft carrier, we learn that McCormick and Putnam know each other from back in their Peace Corps days. Or something. It's really not well-explained, and by that point in the movie, I was finding myself wishing that the cast would break into a Bollywood-style musical number or something because everyone was so tense and serious.
The rest of the film is spent on a confusing trans-oceanic relay race trying to get ahead of the croc and the shark. Why is the shark after the croc? Well....
So those eggs that randomly turned up a while back? As it happens, giant sharks are attracted to the smell of giant crocodile eggs (I mean, who wouldn't be?), and the giant crocodile just happens to have some "evolutionary adaptation" that enables it to lay gajillions of eggs whenever the plot needs it to. (giant pet rock: ham-handledly abusing evolution in order to give some magical characteristic or ability to an organism, even a monstrous one, is one of the reasons that a lot of people don't accept evolution. I certainly don't expect a movie like this to get science right, but when they don't bother to try to explain anything else, but throw evolution under the bus, it just ticks me off.)
Anyway, yeah. Sharks like eggs, and the croc has been cruising all over the oceans laying eggs. Oceans. Plural. Somehow these giant creatures are also endowed with warp drive, because they go from Florida to California to Hawaii in the space of what seems like minutes. And Admiral Calvin's carrier seems to have the same capabilities, because it just happens to be wherever the monsters show up. I'm sure there's a deleted scene that explains that. They probably cut to get the cleavage ratio up.
Right. Well, McCormick, Putnam, and Hutchinson spend a lot of time in this adorable little 4-rotor helicopter, chasing the critters around and coming up with ineffective ways to try to kill them, including:
- Missiles
- Bombs
- Harsh Language
- Nuclear Subs (EPIC FAIL: The shark swallows the submarine. Whole.)
- Glaring Menacingly
- Trapping Them In The Panama Canal And Blowing It Up (Leads to random shark-on-land scene as it chomps its way back to the water, like some weird gray toothy Pac-Man.)
The Canal Scheme doesn't work, although it does manage to get the shark and the croc engaged in tooth to tail combat, where again all sense of consistency of scale is sacrificed in the interest of extra beer money.
They take the fight to Hawaii (I think. Hell, by this point in the movie, they could have been on Mars for all the sense it made), where the croc eggs are starting to hatch. A lucky slap of the croc's tail knocks the Urkelcopter out of the sky, injuring everyone and giving McCormick flashbacks of the shark attack that killed his lady-love. McCormick and Putnam, with a renewed sense of urgency, come up with the Greatest Freakin' Plan Yet To Kill The Giant Monsters!
- Take an inflatable motor boat out to where the monsters are fighting in the ocean
- Drop McCormick's Amazing Sound Generator into the water, tuned to "Create Volcanic Eruption"
- Lure the shark, croc, and half a gajillion baby crocs to the site of the impending eruption
- Get the hell out
What could possibly go wrong with that?
Meanwhile, off camera, Hutchinson has regained consciousness and gotten the Urkelcopter back in the air, and she arrives just as McCormick and Putnam beach their motor boat. They jump in the aircraft and get off the ground just as the volcanic eruption/nuclear explosion (remember, the shark ate a nuclear sub...) goes off, crisping all the critters in the blast.
Hutchinson finally cracks a smile (and it looked genuinely painful) as she reports that the shark and the croc are toast, and then flies off into the sunset.
Hokey smokes.
I never, in a million years, would have guessed that I'd watch a movie of which I can honestly say that Steve Urkel's acting was the unequivocal high point of the film.
Really.
-Jay
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- Mini Book Review: The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, Translated by Reg Keeland
- Montreal Police Finally Investigating David Mabus (UPDATE)
- Biblical Inerrancy
- That’s Offensive!
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