Chapter 11: One Degree to Lethal Weapon

About two weeks into my little experiment I am already starting to feel fatigued. While trying my best to go through the worst ones in the lot, my mind has already started wondering towards movies I have been dying to watch but can't. At the library, the video store and online I see colorful DVD covers from films I have missed over recent years. They can be largely avoided but the posters and standees at work cannot. They taunt me like ten feet tall school yard bullies, pointing and laughing, unwilling to let me join in their fun. I must stay strong.

Part of the trouble may be my strategy of purposely watching the crap-tastic ones first. While stretching down to the bottom of the barrel I may has strained my back and now without a comfy chair to sit down on and relax I may develop sciatica. If you got all that, pat yourself on the metaphor. So these past few days I sat down and watched a few movies I thought I would actually like. Those were The Last Boy Scout (1991) and Attack Force Z (1982).

Thinking back a while I think I might have actually seen The Last Boy Scout. While many of the story nuances may have been beyond me during grade school, one of the last scenes; with the bad guy falling into a helicopter blade is pretty hard to forget. I'm sorry if I ruined it for people who haven't seen it but you could probably decipher from the cover that the good guys win and the bad guys are dispatched in clever ways.

Overall it was a routine buddy cop film with little change in the formula concocted by 48 Hrs. (1982). Good guys argue with each other, bad guys shoot, good guys shoot back, they bro-mantically bond, bad guy dies, catchphrase. The fact that the script is penned by Lethal Weapon (1987) scribe Shane Black should be an indication that its meant for genre fans and casual movie watchers. If you're looking for subtext, you're in the wrong theater.

The film takes place in Los Angeles where the death of a stripper (Halle Berry) forces two very different people to solve her murder. Ones a cynical chain smoking former secret service agent turned private dick (Bruce Willis), the other a former pro-football player axed for illegal gambling (Damon Wayans). Thankfully some of the witty bander from Lethal Weapon inked onto The Last Boy Scout resulting in a very entertaining but ultimately so-so movie.

I liked it, but I was only able to enjoy it after I blocked out the memories of movies like Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour (1998) and Bad Boys (1995). This brings up a larger issue; is it really a bad movie if it invented the cliches exploited in later movies? The Last Boy Scout may not have invented the buddy cop genre but the path was less worn in 1991 than it is in 2012. Its really a question of what you've seen first.

A perfect example would be when I sat down and watched Halloween (1978) for the first time. Its a horror classic to be sure but having watched a slew of slasher flicks over the course of my life Halloween just seemed like a very tame version of the hyper-active stuff I was programmed to like earlier in life. It goes the other way too. When I sit down to watch Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) its a comedy classic! But when I slump on the couch to watch Pineapple Express (2008) I find it incredibly childish and stupid. While I tried my damnedest, and found a lot to like about it, The Last Boy Scout ultimately succumbs to the weight of its cliches which I have seen in both movies before and after it's official release. Watch it only if you want to see Bruce Willis playing a bad-ass or Damon Wayans NOT playing Damon Wayans.

Speaking of cliches...Attack Force Z. A movie saved from obscurity solely because it provided early rolls to Mel Gibson and Sam Neill. Throw parallels to The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968) and you got yourself Attack Force Z; albeit an Australian knock-off of the aforementioned.

A group of Australian special forces is deployed during WWII to recover the passengers of a downed plane in Japanese occupied Dutch East Indies. There they kick the proverbial hornets nest and try to stay alive thanks to the help of an underground resistance movement.

Again, because I have seen so many war movie cliches it was hard to get into this one. I guess I have seen the dramatic self-sacrifice of a noble comrade and stealth gone awry because a twig snapped way too many times. The characters themselves aren't incredibly developed and any attempt to flesh them out feels jerky and unnatural. At one point it just gets absurd as one character stays behind to protect the love interest he had shared a room with only a few cuts ago. Granted she prevented him from being discovered but besides a common enemy they had little to really bond over.

Another major problem I had was the elongated scenes involving other languages like Japanese and Cantonese. Perhaps it was just the version I saw but with no subtitles provided, I was forced to guess what they were saying and only later confirm what was going on. Plus if I'm not mistaken, they speak Malay in Indonesia not Cantonese.
Both films ultimately were near hits for me. They were good in all the stereotypical ways and I doubt everyone less picky than me won't enjoy them.