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MOVIE REVIEWS [In Brief] . The Ten, Cool Dimension, The Illusionist, Monster Squad

Summertime house cleaning continues, with the Ten Commandments comedy,The Ten, the female martial artist action film, Cool Dimension, the me-too magician film, The Illusionist, and cult classic, The Monster Squad. Enjoy.

The Ten . A comedy featuring ten short stories, each centering about one of the Ten Commandments, from the guys who brought you The State. And, if you remember The State, or Kids in the Hall, or any of those uber-random Canadian comedy shows, you know that that this serves only as the loosest framework for the skits, before they careen off into the realm of head scratching strange. By and large these are funnier than the SNL and Mad TV skits that pass for comedy these days, but the whole package is largely unbalanced. There are a few inspired bits, including the “Coveting” segment which features Live Schrieber involved in a bit of neighborly competition over amassing a personal collection of CAT-Scan Machines, the “Theft” segment, which has Wynona Ryder as a Ventriloquist’s dummy obsessed newlywed, and an “Adultery” segment involving prison inmates and “bitch” cheating. Some other notables include the “Honor thy Mother and Father” segment featuring Oliver Platt, and an animated segment featuring a lie-spreading Rhino regarding the bearing of false witness. The film has one of the oddest casts of the year, including, in addition to those mentioned above, Paul Rudd, Jessica Alba, and Janeane Garofalo. It’s worth noting that Kris and I saw The Ten in a completely empty theater. Seriously, we were the only two in attendance. I guess everyone else was basking in the idiocy that is Hot Rod. Oh well. The Ten is an interesting, deeply flawed comedy, but at least it made me laugh more than most of the comedic films to hit out screens of late.

Cool Dimension: Innocent Assassin . Imagine The Matrix crossed with Charlie’s Angels and then robbed of all sense of adventure and excitement. That’s Cool Dimension, a low budget V-Cinema girls and guns actioner that pretty much fails on every level. The plot sees a trio of female assassins (ranging from cute to fugly) tasked with assassinating a government informant. But when one of the assassins grows a conscience, suspecting the sukebe old politician who hired them for the job is actually the one at fault, everything goes to hell. I initially found out about the film at Twitch, but it turns out the trailers they linked feature nearly all the fight footage in the film. Lead girl Yoko Mitsuya (Noriko’s Dinner Table) handles most of these altercations, and to be honest she does a pretty good job. The final fight, while only about five minutes long, is pretty hard hitting, with Mitsuya delivering a bevy of flying kicks and whirling steel pipes. Still, at only 70 minutes long it still somehow manages to be fairly drawn out and un-engaging. It’s hard to make female pleather clad martial artist assassins boring, but Cool Dimension finds quite a few ways to do so. Probably best to avoid this one.

The Illusionist . Stupid on an epic scale. The Illusionist is 2006’s magician film for the Lifetime channel crowd, complete with self-important dialog, tepid romance, tedious story, and out and out lameness. If you saw the Prestige, no worries – you saw the right one. Edward Norton is his usual wooden self, and Jessica Biel a bit lost, while Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell steal the show. There’s a lot of CG “illusioning” to please the Harry Potter and Anne McCaffrey fans, but after the Prestige’s brilliant concrete deconstruction of its magicians’ trickery, it all comes across as a bit uninspired. The film has an ugly yellow tinge (to make it look like an old film reel), which grows a bit distracting and ultimately hinders audience involvement in a resulting murder case, as the red blood is obscured in pee-stain. There’s a reason this film died in the theater. Skip it.

The Monster Squad . Writing a review for The Monster Squad at this point in time is just about as unnecessary as writing a review for Office Space. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ve heard of it. And, with the film now appearing on DVD, you’re bound to have some close friend show it to you. I will say that this tale of foul mouthed “Little Rascals meets the Universal Monsters” holds up surprisingly well. I’ve revisited a few of my childhood favorites in recent years, including Transformers: The Movie and GI-Joe: The Movie, but this is one of the few that actually warrants viewing after twenty years. The Shane Black (Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang) script is surprisingly well written, and the effects, not being CG, still look rather convincing today. The disc retails for about $12.99, so old fans and new converts will have little reason not to pick it up. Good stuff.

About the Author

Chris Nelson has been a film fanatic since age six. A former film and English major, he is now a Software Engineer and contract Technical Writer living in the Silicon Valley.