Pages

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Far Cry, a good stupid action movie

Til Schweiger deftly handles the role of Jack Carver, your typical action movie former special forces guy turned alcoholic whale watch boat captain who doesn’t like to shave.

image

Movie title: Far Cry

Rating: 7/10

Pace: 9/10

Movie classification: Action & Adventure, Science Fiction

Year: 2008

Length: 94 minutes

Language: English

Country: Germany

Directed by: Uwe Boll

Written by: Michael Roesch, Peter Scheerer

Acted by: Natalia Avelon, Chris Coppola, Udo Kier, Ralf Moeller, Til Schweiger, Emmanuelle Vaugier

Synopsis:

Former special forces guy, Jack, turned heavy drinking whale watch boat operator agrees to take Valerie, an investigative reporter, to an off limits island in search of her brother, whom she has lost contact with. Valerie's brother has been surgically altered by Dr. Lucas Krieger into a zombie-like super soldier. The island is a testing ground for super soldier development.

Evaluation:

Uwe Boll, the director of Far Cry, contrary to internet group-think, is a very good director. Anyone who has seen Boll's other film, Rampage, and believes that Boll is a bad director, has his or her head up his or her ass.

Far Cry is adapted from a video game. There is a great deal of bitching and moaning about how Far Cry the video game fails to live up to Far Cry the movie. How the video game measures up to this movie is irrelevant. Far Cry the movie is a good, stupid action flick. That's all it is -- that's all it wants to be. Unlike other movies in this genre, Far Cry is smart enough to spare us the melodramatic details of why Jack quit the special forces to become a drunkard whale-watch captain. We don't give a shit. We want to see Jack dodge RPG's and kill bad guys in order to save his love interest, Valerie. We want to see Jack sex it up with Valerie. (Actually, unfortunately, we don't get to see nearly enough of this.) We want to see the greedy Dr. Krieger's evil and exotically beautiful military commander, Katia, kick everyone's ass. We don't care how stupid or recycled the plot is, because it never gets bogged down. Also, this movie has excellent comic relief, supplied by the island's food delivery guy, Emillio, played by Chris Coppola. We don't see Emillio until near the end; I wish we had seen more of him.

Photos:

Shown below with a gun to his head, the great German actor, Udo Kier, plays the mad scientist, Dr. Krieger. (I’m not being sarcastic about Udo Kier being a great actor.)

image

Emmanuelle Vaugier (left) plays Valerie, the girl-next-door reporter. Natalia Avelon (right) plays the evil superhottie martial arts expert, Katia Chernov. If you like women, you will wish that you were one of the men she kung fu’s to death.

image

And not only does Far Cry give us an eyeful of cleavage baring superhottie, it also gives us the zombie supersoldiers that sophisticated audiences demand.

image

Comic relief is expertly provided by Chris Coppola, who plays Emillio

image

No comments: