Ah, bachelorhood

With Sarah out of town for the week, I have spent almost all of this weekend in the bachelor position - lazing on the couch, remote by my side, bowl of cereal in hand. The few times I have ventured out of that space have mostly been to go the Redbox down the street to pick up or return movies, specifically some of those outside Sarah's cinematic taste. I watched two, which, coincidentally, also fell mostly outside the bounds of palatable cinema. They were The Karate Kid (remake) and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

The Karate Kid might have been ok if it was about 20-30 minutes shorter. Most of the excess fat came at the beginning - a boring, flavorless 40 minutes of exposition about the Kid and his mother's moving from Detroit to China, struggling to fit in, and being the victim of a 10?-year-old martial-arts expert bully. Nearly needless to say it was high on dramatics, and low on actual drama. At about the 45-minute mark, we finally see Jackie Chan, who takes on the master/teacher role in the reboot, step up and defend the kid, demolishing the previously mentioned bully and 5 of his punk friends. This is also the point at which the film becomes watchable.

We all know where it goes from here. The Kid, played by Jaden Smith (son of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith), begins training with the maintenance man/martial arts maven, eventually going on to challenge and defeat a series of the kid goons in a Kung Fu tournament, culminating, of course, with the chief bully. The story is spiced up from the original with the bullying theme, the inclusion of the rival dojo's "wrong way" methods, the replacement of the master's "wax on, wax off" teaching theme with "jacket on, jacket off," and maybe? some subtle political theme about U.S. international economic policies. In all, it was bad. Jaden Smith was terrible for the first third of the film, then adequate the rest of the way, and pretty decent in the martial arts scenes. But he brought no depth to the character. Nor did Chan, who compensates by still looking darn good kicking bully butt at his relatively old age. The biggest highlights come during the concluding tournament, which features both comical jumbotron animation of the dueling competitors and, much to my delight, a Mortal Kombat-esque command from the evil dojo's master during the final match to "FINISH HIM!" That the movie studio allowed the film to register at over two hours is inexcusable.

G.I. Joe is much easier to sum up. A ludicrous villain uses ludicrous technology to execute a ludicrous world-domination plot. The dialogue is poor, and the acting sinks to its level. Channing Tatum plays the lead, Duke, and is wretched. Other pretty faces fall flat in delivering their lines as well. Interestingly, two LOST alumni, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Mr. Eko) and Saïd Taghmaoui (Caesar) appear as members of the Joes, but they are generally not good. The only really respectable actor in the flick is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who portrays Rex/The Doctor, the evil scientist behind the evil plot. Unfortunately, all of his lines are spoken through a voice modulator/breathing instrument, which he needs as a result of an utterly predictable connecting twist seen in flashback, thus rendering his dialogue virtually emotionless. In all, it was bad. The film ends with a dramatic reveal setting up the presupposed sequel. I guess I really should not criticize the movie too much, as I honestly did not pay a lot of attention to about three-fourths of it. I had hoped to get a dollar's worth of entertainment from it. I got about a quarter.