Atlas Shrugged: Part II (Fox Blu-ray)/Girls
Against Boys (Anchor
Bay Blu-ray)/Lay The Favorite (Weinstein/Anchor Bay
Blu-ray)/Sushi Girl (MagNet
Blu-ray/all 2012)
Picture:
B- Sound: B/B-/B/B Extras: D/D/C-/D Main Programs: D/C/C-/D
Here is a
selection of half-baked genre films that trey to be different and even say
something at times, but all get into their own unique trouble…
John
Putch’s Atlas Shrugged: Part II (2012)
is the sequel and continuation of the adaptation of that very thick Ayn Rand
book of the same name that I was not impressed with in its first part, as this
Blu-ray coverage will verify:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/11292/Atlas+Shrugged,+Part+One+(2011/Fo
Though
there is some more money here on the screen, the cast has been changed too much
to really connect this one with the first and it continues all the errors,
mistakes and generic-ness of the first one.
Samantha Mathis, D.B. Sweeney, Jason Beghe, Esai Morales and Richard T.
Jones were among the faces and names I recognized, but this just drags on and
on and on for 112 minutes and like the first, suffers from bad updating ideas
and never feels or plays like one of the late author’s books.
This is a
curio and again, is obvious Right Wing political propaganda, but at least it is
not as sloppy as the first, but a total dud just the same. Extras include Deleted Scenes, a Behind The
Scenes featurette and extended footage of Sean Hannity’s participation in the
film.
Austin
Chick’s Girls Against Boys wants to
be a cleaner rape/revenge film, but just attempting that spells doom despite a
cast that is actually watchable and for a few seconds here and there which is
where the focus of this project should have been, because it is shockingly the
most watchable of the four releases here by default and has a script that is
simply running on empty.
Shae
(Panabaker) has trouble with a series of bad men (though the film is not
necessarily a man-0hating film, it comes very close with its reverse
virgin/whore complex) so once an ugly rape happens, a female friend helps her
get mad and even, all told too safely in flashback for a major chunk of time,
which is a cop out in this case. Then it
goes off into other directions instead of concentrating and falls apart in the
end. Too bad.
Audio
commentary by Chick and Actress Danielle Panabaker are the only extras.
Stephen
Frears is a very smart, capable director, but unfortunately, Lay The Favorite is one of his weakest
films ever. Comedy does not always work
for him, but High Fidelity has its
cult following and Hero has its
admirers, yet this is never even as interesting as any of them. Rebecca hall is a gal looking for a job and
lands up working in gambling thanks to an eccentric man (Bruce Willis, wearing
funny t-shirts throughout in a spoof of his repetitious appearance in most of
his recent films) but his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose appearance in the Ocean’s sequels were this lame too) is
not too happy, but the male clients are.
Dull,
flat, constantly unfunny and with almost no energy, there is not one funny
moment and rarely did I even smile as I waited for this film to get started and
it never did. Joshua Jackson is bored
and boring as Hall’s love interest and even Vince Vaughn shows up playing
(surprise?) a gambler, but is light years away from his work in Made. This was based on a book??? Geez!
Yawn!!!
Deleted
Scenes are the only extras.
Finally
we have Kern Saxton’s Sushi Girl
(2012) which is simply a torture porn film with trivial, lame twists disguised
as a 1970s-styled urban genre comedy, but it is not any more than Eli Roth is
Quentin Tarantino. The film has an
ex-con (Noah Hathaway, not so cleverly named Fish) getting out of jail, only to
be tied up upon visiting the old crime buddies he did not tell on while in jail
for 6 years and they repay him with torture as they expect he knows where their
stolen diamonds are.
Led By
Duke (Tony Todd) and including Mark Hamill in a bizarre turn as if he were
playing singer/songwriter Paul Williams as a psychopath, they sit around a live
woman covered only in food and any promising start quickly fades as the script
and dialogue get odder, dumber and more idiotic (not to mention clichéd)
throughout. Jeff Fahey, Michael Biehn, Danny Trejo and the legendary Sonny
Chiba also show up, but to no avail as this is awful, never gets good and is
just a cynical gimmick package deal with no point.
Most
amusing is that the film decides to use the James Bond theme song for Diamonds Are Forever (1971) by Shirley
Bassey as its titles music, but Bond fans should note this is not in real 7.1
sound by just the stereo song from the soundtrack album (different and a
different mix than the song in the actual film, in 5.1 on that film’s terrific
new Blu-ray) and that is the best part of this mess.
Extras
include Outtakes, Alternate Scenes, a Music Video, fake commercials,
Storyboards, two sets of stills, trailers, two audio commentary tracks and a
documentary on making this forgettable dud.
The
picture quality on all four discs is stylized down a bit to look a little dark
and that cuts into detail and depth. The
1080p 1.78 X 1 AVC @ 32 MBPS digital High Definition image transfer on Atlas has additional limits with the
mixed digital visual effects used, while the same on Girls (1.78 X 1), Lay
(1.85 X 1) and Sushi (a not so
colorful 2.35 X 1) all come up a bit short for what they could and should have
looked like.
The sonic
champ is Sushi with its consistent
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 7.1 lossless mix, but it does not do much with the
possibilities it had, so the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on Atlas and Lay can compete with surprisingly consistent soundfields
throughout. That leaves the Dolby TrueHD
5.1 mix on Girls too much towards
the front channels and with portions that are not always well recorded.
- Nicholas Sheffo
